This Needs Fixin'

I’m kind of at a loss today for not-climbing-a-clock-tower style approaches to our current political situation.

So let’s talk tech instead.

I’ve written before about the privacy issues with voice assistant systems; they’re … not good.

I mean, they’re basically an always-on microphone with an Internet connection; of course they’re problematic to have around.

But they’re about to get worse.

Amazon announced last week that they’re removing the setting that lets users tell Alexa devices not to push recordings to “the cloud”.

Alexa devices (like all voice assistants) have always been able to record whatever they hear and send it off to parts unknown. But at least you could tell them not to?

They might very well do it anyway, but at least they had a way to tell them not to.

And now they won’t even have that.

Amazon says they’re doing this to “expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI” which, if that were actually true, they could have just done for users who wanted it without affecting anyone else.

As Ed Zitron has extensively documented, though, adoption of generative AI when offered as an alternative is extremely low so boosters have to make it a mandatory feature just to get users to accept even having it.

Very few of those users will ever actually use it.

So, again, stop buying these things.

For any like the Amazon Echo that don’t work without an Internet connection, get the ones you already have down to the nearest e-waste dropoff center.

And really, really, really don’t buy them as presents. That’s just cruel.

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