Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: from Mar 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…
-
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/alt…
1/
Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28
Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)
reshared this
New tinnitus treatment emerges from blocking back-channels in the ear
newatlas.com/biology/tinnitus-…
#news #science #health #medicine #tinnitus
New tinnitus treatment emerges from blocking back-channels in the ear
You could compensate for broken speakers by cranking up the volume on others that still work. It turns out that the brain does the same thing when damaged hair cells in the ear lead to hearing loss – and this could be causing your tinnitus.Michael Irving (New Atlas)
The #pollution of the planet by #microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesise.
The analysis estimates that between 4% and 14% of the world’s staple crops of wheat, rice and maize is being lost due to the pervasive particles.
Microplastic pollution could increase the number at risk of starvation by another 400 million in the next two decades.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
#food #plastics #nature #fossilfuels
Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation
Researchers say problem could increase number of people at risk of starvation by 400m in next two decadesDamian Carrington (The Guardian)
Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28
Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…
#news #tech #technology #security #privacy #AI #amazon #alexa
TSA Says Its Credit Cards for Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Are Cut Off
The statement follows an alleged internal email which said requests for dog food and vet visits had been put on hold.
I agree. We are witnessing the end of the post WWII world. The #USA is devolving into something else. What we knew is not coming back and #canada has to pivot permanently.
#Trump #tariffs
#cdnpoli #uspoli
#DougFord
thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/03/14…
Think Doug Ford Is Best to Handle Trump? Think Again | The Tyee
Actually, he’s proven worse than ineffective. He’s dangerous for Canada.Emmett Macfarlane (The Tyee)
#elbowsup #cdnpoli #canada #mexico #fascism #antifa #cdnpoli #canada #mexico #fascism #antifa #france #nato #submarine #halifax
Yeah, NATO is over, when their meeting doesn't invite #mairikkka but does invite #japan and #australia, and then a French nuclear attack sub shows up in our base in #halifax.
Yup. New era. Let go of 20c, and even the 911 world order.
(Also, I didn't know anyone thought #dougford is who should be leading our #mairikkkan counterattack? He's all about him.)
Another week. Another museum. This week the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. I came here largely to see this one tool chest.
It's the Mästermyr toolchest. A 1000 year old chest filled with blacksmithing and woodworking tools. It's an incredibly important find. Beautifully preserved in the bog. The tools are wonderful. I'd seen pictures and read about these tools, but to see them up close. That hack saw is exquisite.
I wonder how the chest ended up discarded.
arrowlordsofmetal.nl/sequel-sp…
#news #movie #sequel #SpinalTap #ReleaseDate
The Trump administration is coming for student protesters
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest reveals the Kafkaesque nightmare that awaits those arrested by ICE — whether or not they have a green card.
theverge.com/policy/630129/tru…
#news #politics #uspol #uspolitics #GOPCult #trump #ethics #corruption
The Trump administration is coming for student protesters
DHS announced that more Columbia students had been arrested or ‘self-deported’ after their visas were canceled in connection to pro-Palestine protests.Gaby Del Valle (The Verge)
Long live the Fediverse indeed! I appreciate this environment more and more each day.
I ditched Twitter before it was X, in the November 2022 wave, and for a short time, I missed it. But I really enjoy the community I’ve built here, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
Jay Drake 🇨🇦 ≠51 reshared this.
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
hackaday.com/2025/03/15/my-sca…
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster
Nobody likes spam messages, but some of them contain rather fascinating scams. Case in point, [Ben Tasker] recently got a few romance scam emails that made him decide to take a poke at the scam beh…Hackaday
Travel Guide for Hokitika and Paparoa National Park, New Zealand - New Zealand Purple Travel Guide
Paparoa National Park is known for its limestone karst formations, caves, diverse flora and fauna, outdoor activities and the spectacular Charleston Glowworm Cave.Backpack and Snorkel Travel Guides - The Home of the Purple Travel Guides
@popularposts I gotta say, after a decade under Orban it feels like I have a crystal ball for the US politics.
Every one of these just rings a bell.
Marco Pavanello / Wolf Studio makes really cool CGI videos and animations with Blender:
➡️ @marco
There are already 23 videos uploaded, you can browse them all at makertube.net/a/marco/videos
You might particularly want to check out the short films "The Spark" (makertube.net/w/qPzyWiJPBhej8W…) and "Pebble" (makertube.net/w/tihdkkgvmKHsxk…).
You can also follow Pavanello's general social media account at @nacioss
#FeaturedPeerTube #Blender #CGI #Animation #3DGraphics #PeerTube #PeerTubers
A great writeup on why young men are being sucked into today's ultra-toxic masculinity.
Yes, it's more complex than this. But people with no hope and no future will grasp at anything.
irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co…
Séamas O'Reilly: We need to stop lying about what makes lost boys such easy marks for cons
Economically depressed young men are aggressively targeted with the oldest, most seductive pitch there is — money for nothing — by bad faith actors with enormous wealthIrishExaminer.com
I was looking for something else in my old photos and came across these pictures of violets taken in the NC wilderness, in Pisgah National Forest, a few years ago.
I still haven't gotten over the fact that we can carry in our pockets cameras capable of pictures like this.
Oh thank you!
I remember looking that up right after I took them, and then forgot it. 😳
I edited the OP to reflect your kind correction for the people who see it later.
SpaceX's Crew-10 mission is on its way to the ISS
https://www.engadget.com/science/space/spacexs-crew-10-mission-is-on-its-way-to-the-iss-133045695.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Gear @gear-Engadget
SpaceX's Crew-10 mission is on its way to the ISS
SpaceX's Crew-10 mission has launched from Florida, taking new crew members to the ISS and allowing Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to fly back home as soon ...Mariella Moon (Engadget)
Fear and resignation after ‘world’s most powerful company’ pays Trump a $100 billion ‘protection fee’
cnn.com/2025/03/13/tech/taiwan…
#news #tech #technology #business #taiwan #politics #uspol #uspolitics #trump #ethics #corruption
‘Spreadsheets of empire’: red tape goes back 4,000 years, say scientists after Iraq finds
Ancient Mesopotamian stone tablets show extraordinary detail and reach of government in cradle of world civilisationsDalya Alberge (The Guardian)
[Update: Sold! Thank you! 💙]
I'm enjoying working with this palette this week - feels refreshing! 🎨
Hopeful Sunrise, oil on Arches oil paper, 6"x4"
Original works on paper are available in my online shop:
tishamark.com/product-category…
#MastoArt #FediArt #art #painting
It’s been a while since I posted a #caturday picture, but this one of Lilu holding on to her dreams seemed to good not to…
n00b trying to learn Pixelfed. It's the future. But finding accounts is a challenge. I found findmyfriends.online/ which is meant to locate Mastodon folks on Pixelfed, but that's not working for me.
Pixelfed made an announcement about creating accounts with your Mastodon info, but that also seems not to work.
What I *don't* want - and I'm sure most people don't want - is to follow Mastodon in Pixelfed and visa versa. It's a different kind of content, frankly.
Thoughts? 😀
I have a PF account at @graham.dunning
Designing geometric flowerpots comes with its own challenges—especially the corners of the upper rim. I started with a triangle-shaped pot, and getting those corners just right was tricky, but incredibly satisfying in the final design and print!
Take a look: printables.com/model/748599
Triangle Flower Pot in Various Sizes by Metikumi | Download free STL model | Printables.com
This is my design of a plain triangle flower pot with flat sides. | Download free 3D printable STL modelswww.printables.com
Here are 8 photography winners with disabilities who show the world their perspective
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/03/15/g-s1-51102/photo-contest-winners-people-with-disabilities?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Health @health-npr
#Trump’s threats especially on taking over #Canada, leave Canadian veterans that served alongside US troops particularly angry.
“Over more than a dozen years in #Afghanistan, 158 Canadian soldiers were killed, along with seven civilians.
An additional 2,000 troops were wounded.”
the issue: LCD autodetect works by twiddling a couple of LCD pins at boot, and then reading analog values on two adjacent pins to give us a hint at the connections on the glass. But when waking from sleep mode, I was mistakenly trying to run screen detection again — even though these pins were already being driven by the LCD controller! This means it was measuring values that didn't correlate with the thing we wanted to detect.
Solution: don't run autodetect if the display is already running.
Sullivan, a Republican Washington state Senator on radio after hearing trucks rolling thru BC from lower 49 US states may get tariffs imposed on them:
“Canada, you don't want to mess with #Alaska.
“And if you do, we are going to work hard on having our cruise ships bypass your ports, and that will help our economy tremendously.”
Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Starmer fordert weiteren Druck auf Putin ++
Der britische Premier Starmer hat dazu aufgerufen, bei Friedensverhandlungen den Druck auf Kremlchef Putin aufrechtzuerhalten. Im Gebiet Kursk werden weitere Gefechte zwischen russischen und ukrainischen Streitkräften gemeldet.
More of what the #Musk/Trump administration is doing to hurt people in #NorthCarolina
Canceling a program that paid for fresh food directly from farmers to go to food banks in our state. Good for everyone...
bpr.org/2025-03-14/usda-cancel…
USDA cancels $11 million in federal funding for North Carolina food banks
The USDA has notified the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services that it would terminate the agreement for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, which is one of the programs NC food banks participate in.Sharryse Piggott (Blue Ridge)
"What kind of demented Trump reality do we live in that this even had to be said,"
- Aure
"We will never, ever, in any way, shape or form, be part of the United States"
- Canadian PM Mark Carney
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #Canada #GOP #Politics #uspolitics #uspol
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's easy to flap your hands at this thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which confines this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because of bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a *material* phenomenon, grounded in *specific policy choices* and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here - and where we should go next.
2/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: *why* does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?
3/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" - a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.
4/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio - about triple the ratio of rivals like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors - they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock.
5/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/pri…
But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing.
6/
Pluralistic: Two weak spots in Big Tech economics (06 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime.
7/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.
8/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.
That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies.
9/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.
OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.
How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo *after you bought it*? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property.
10/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:
> That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it?
11/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:
pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/rec…
That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let *you* get inside *your* Echo and change the software back.
12/
Pluralistic: They brick you because they can (24 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner.
13/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device *after* you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit…
The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification.
14/
Pluralistic: Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA (26 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twi…
15/
Twiddler – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon - without your permission, against your express wishes - is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?
Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is *unbelievably* backwards.
16/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:
pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…
This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale.
17/
Pluralistic: Privacy first (06 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:
gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-…
18/
Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users
Lucas Ropek (Gizmodo)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.
19/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:
pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/reg…
20/
Regulatory Capture – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:
pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/mon…
21/
Pluralistic: The super-rich got that way through monopolies (17 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.
Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:
pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux…
22/
Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2022 Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re still the product – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:
archive.is/TD90k
23/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:
washingtonpost.com/technology/…
Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are *also* being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.
*Not one of mine
24/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24:
mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
And in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
25/
Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Stock Catalog/quotecatalog.com (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
Sam Howzit (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:Alexa (40770465691).jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
reminds me of the East German telephone which was wired up to backfeed audio from the room to the Stasi (all analogue telephones of that era can be altered to do this, DDR built this wiring change into the telephone set), and even when this was a plug and socket phone which could have been unplugged many didn't do so (as they didn't want to miss the telephone calls and even having a phone was a privilege in those days)
public.beuth-hochschule.de/ham…
RFT DIAL TELEPHONE ALPHA - A "STASI BUG" / EINE "STASI WANZE"
public.beuth-hochschule.deCory Doctorow reshared this.
draeath
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK • • •Sensitive content
samiamsam
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
ummmm
why are they keeping records?
never mind......
samiamsam
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
ummmmm
WHY were they keeping recordings in the first place
never mind.......
Thomas P. Moonis
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
"But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo..."
Well you see that's where you're wrong.
Nicole Parsons
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As nations cancel their contracts to buy F-35 and other military equipment, one can be assured that similarly insecure post-purchase modification tech exists in those multi-billion dollar items.
Bought a military drone that uses Starlink? Can you be sure Musk won't shut it off in the middle of a fight for your survival as a nation?
Monitoring wildfires for waterbomber planes? What happens if #KochNetwork wants to evade lawsuits for climate change & shuts it off?
Jo - pièce de résistance
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cykonot
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •the highest p/e industry is health, which is especially disturbing when you consider politicians investment incentives... A public option could hurt some of them a lot. Stopping the expansion of monopolies is bad because they're the high-growth parts of their portfolios
Allowing politicians to invest such that they're aligned against their constituents opens the door to abuse. And that's without considering lobbying, cushy post-politics jobs, speaking gigs, book deals and the like.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This isn't the first IoT manufacturer to abandon the "local only" option.
What many people do is throw away the now-faulty kit, replace it with something that works locally, and never buy from that brand again.
Ponygirl
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Led By Gilded Fools
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •One should always follow XKCDs advice about listening devices, just in case.
XKCD Alt-text "Sure you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host-gift thing"
Dan McDonald
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Reay
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •zetabeta
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The Net is Vast and Infinite
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
SouprMatt
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Remember when people found out this was already happening years ago? Then Amazon’s execs said “oops we didn’t mean to!”
npr.org/2023/06/01/1179381126/…
There is a fix though. Throw it into a dumpster.
Meowshell
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Flic Meetwood
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •SpaceLifeForm
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •When I was left with 2 Echo(s) due to family deaths, I gave them away. No way I would ever even power them on and let them see WiFi.
#OpSec
Jo - pièce de résistance
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Dan Kortschak
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Dan Kortschak • • •Dan Kortschak
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •KayeMac04
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •This probably means a blind friend of mine who keeps Echo on 24/7 will have all their intimate conversations with carers kept as data. Stuff such as catheterisation, mobility, diet, relationships that will come back to him as advertising.
Edit: I’m obviously barking up the wrong tree re: several aspects of Echo listening in. I appreciate the conversation this then started. I think the take away is: at what point after wake up does Echo/Alexa stop listening if it’s not told to stop.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
LisaH
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Wow well that's it. Destroying all my Echo devices before then
Does this apply to other Alexa devices like Dots?
Bruce Acton 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The Turtle
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Wombatadon
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Second best time :- today!
CubeThoughts
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Concentration of power is the disease and "consumer welfare" style anti-trust is the infection point. But now it's metastasised to include no meaningful privacy, regulatory capture, Citizens United etc.
The US needs meaningful anti-trust but how can that be achieved when politicians and agencies are bought and paid for. Even Biden didn't prioritize this meta policy except for the very meaningful appointment of Linda Khan.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
chris
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •