It's got a camera but it also has a shutter to block it out. OP's appears to be closed. Also he's well within the view of the camera but it doesn't seem to detect his presence until he says "Alexa..."
We have one. It has a slide you use to cover the camera. Ours stays unplugged unless we want a radio or make a call while cooking or something. Hopefully the wife will get rid of it soon.
Yeah you are crazy if you think this is the only thing tracking you. I hope you are commenting this from a library PC and you carry around a pager and have the few remaining local pay phone locations memorized cause that device in your pocket is tracking far more than these things.
I'm writing on a Fairphone with degoogled Android. Also the idea that just because some things are spying on you, you should get even more things that spy on you, is stupid as fuck.
You are still getting tracked my guy. I don’t have a home device or anything akin to it, but I don’t see how it’s any different from the tracking device in everyone’s pocket. Whole thing is unavoidable at this point.
You can tell it what songs to play. Set reminders. Crap like that. She used it for a bit now it’s unplugged. I dunno what she does. I can’t read minds. I let her do what she wants.
Why would the -not UI- have any time at all on it? A placeholder? Since the beginning of time digital clocks have either used 12:00 or —:— as a placeholder.
Updating the screen takes processing power, memory, reading from storage, and electricity needlessly if no one's looking at it. It's the same reason iPhones have variable refresh rates (or ProMotion) on their screens where the screen can stay on all day on the lockscreen without affecting battery life as much. Updating to a default 12:00 or --:-- takes more power than just doing nothing.
It has to be on some level, in order to hear the wake word.
I believe the official line is that that processing is done locally. Iirc without an internet connection she will respond but just reply I'm having trouble connecting.
Safest to assume always listening, same for smartphones tbh. I know they say they're not, but I've had ads for things I've only mentioned verbally. Could be good guesses but it's happened like 4-5 times now.
It has to be on some level, in order to hear the wake word.
Yup, but then even just hearing the wake word does, I think, have it dialling home immediately. I think this is to double check if it's a legitimate wake.
If someone on TV says "Alexa", I see the ring light up but then immediately turn off. I assume it sends the wake word home for double checking, but then the servers say "No, we've heard that exact intonation 100+ times lately, it must just be a TV show."
TV and Radio ads use a specific process to have it ignore the wake word.
We've been having wifi issues where I work, and there are times when the network drops, and our Alexa will wake to the word, and then when it can't get to the web, tell us that the internet is down. But it still doesn't activate for commercials on our TV, which is 2' from it.
Yeah you're pretty much spot on. When the onboard wakeword model is triggered, the network stream opens and the cloud-based validation layers run on the audio data. One of those validation layers is audio fingerprinting, which includes both static fingerprints for things like first-party Amazon commercials that can be pre-baked into the models, as well as dynamic fingerprinting for the scenario you describe. If the same exact invocation audio is received a hundred times (or whatever the thresholding formula is), future requests are cloud-suppressed.
It recently came out that LG televisions have build in mics that listen and send their data back to LG. They also were caught spying on devices over hdmi and allowing any app developer to use your home network as a proxy
Yes because that's how voice to text searches work. The entire video was deeply flawed and sensationalized. Anyone who understands how mDNS works and how a lot of this works can see right through that nonsense video.
Ok maybe I was a little bit fuzzy on all of the technical details, but the philosophy of all of the LG heads was quite plainly evil.
“We own the glass” “the lg living room”
They frame everything around how they own the tv, the right to advertise to you, and they invest so much into data harvesting and brokering.
Also you the hdmi spying, that’s just plainly disgusting no matter how you look at it
It's constantly "recording" in the vaguest sense. There's a small circular audio buffer that keeps a few seconds of audio in memory, only to be immediately discarded by the next few seconds of audio.
If your phone responds to "hey google" or "hey siri", it's doing the exact same thing.
If you actually prompt the device and it recognizes the wake word, then it fully records your prompt and sends it to the cloud.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, but here’s something to think about. A year or so ago I actually read a really interesting journal from some college in Germany. They were saying that because things like WiFi signals are so common now they can actually be used to basically “see” in public spaces. They even tested it where they were essentially able to scan peoples’ faces and identify with a fairly high rate of accuracy in an airport. The consensus was that the general public should be concerned though, because intelligence agencies have better options already and it shouldn’t effect most folks.
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u/Mooch07 8h ago
Which means Alexa is watching you too? Do these models have a camera? I’ve never seen one of these. Maybe just a motion detector.