I think Alexa is listening to us when it’s not supposed to be
 

My wife and I were discussing bunion surgery. A few minutes later, I went on Facebook to surf and up pops an ad for a bunion surgery center. Wtf. I think the beotch is spying on us.

Thanks, now I'm going to see bunion surgery ads as well.

Yes. She is. No speculation necessary

I would NEVER willingly put one of those in my house.

Does Bezos and his ilk look like the kind of people you could trust with your personal data?

Having said that I know someone who is very paranoid and yet he has Alexa listening in on everything going on inside his house. :confused:
(Fake Moon landings, 9/11 truther etc.)

if there was only
an easy solution

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That phenomenon has existed since long before Alexa or Google hub.
Reports of people getting facebook ads for things they were talking about earlier have existed for years.

So Amazon who owns Alexa is selling my info to FB who then sells my info to advertisers? Mothereffers!

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I have deep, intimate knowledge of Alexa and the technical underpinnings and was involved with a number of regulatory and compliance certifications of the device and services.

I have several throughout my house, including in my office where I spend all day in meetings discussing highly confidential projects with Amazon competitors.

I'm not saying a little skepticism isn't healthy, but I don't think "they" are listening to you when the device is asleep. Beyond my own first hand knowledge I would point to the many former employees (remember, this is a company with literally hundreds of thousands of employees) and the lack of any leaks to this effect, you simply could not keep something as big as "Amazon listens to your conversations and uses them to target ads to you on Facebook" under wraps. We are talking about a device that premiered in 2014 here, so there are many thousands of former employees who worked on this platform in addition to those working on it right now.

I may be Facebook through your cell phone listening in.

One day we were driving with Apple Maps on and discussing that a lot of people were going to die from the pandemic…and Siri said without being asked “Here is a list of the nearest hospitals, where would you like to go?”

WTF? The Siri Beotch was apparently also listening to our conversation….

I wouldn’t do that Dave

So is Google and Apple. Welcome to the "big brother"

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Yep without a doubt. First time I realized it was a couple of years ago, me and my stepdaughter where sitting out on the deck, talking about a trip to San Antonio. Later on in the afternoon, both of us started getting ads about SA on our FB. We were like WTF? that's pretty creepy. After that, started paying attention to ads popping up more and more for things in general conversation. It was really obvious that our phones are listening to us

The weirdest thing that's happened was a few weeks ago, over a friends house, was looking at BBQ rubs on his counter. Never once did either of us mention the name brand or even say the words BBQ rub. When I got home that night, I was getting ads for that exact brand that he was using.

.

+1

Brother and I walking thru an empty house last year and my cell phone is in my jacket pocket. He says "You could put a Murphy bed in here".

Guess what I get ads for on my desktop? I think it was YouTube.

If its not listening, how does it know when you give it a command?

I knew the NSA, and the tech industry was tied to Alexa before it came out. LOL! You have a slip of the tongue and you could have a visit from the feds, LOL! You should have known!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1645191001.jpg

Siri does listen all of the time (listening for "hey siri"). But there is also a setting where you can tell her "I don't want to have to say 'hey, siri.'" I have no idea, but when that setting came out or in some subsequent upgrade it may have been made a default.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my wife about the Janus motorcycle I ended up buying. Then she started getting Facebook ads for Janus motorcycles. As did I. There is no doubt in my mind that the phone is always on to receiving voice information and passing it onto various apps.

Its worse than that I get ads for things i was just thinking about and didnt say a word. I dont even own a cell phone. I need a foil hat!

Lol, ya think?

I think this is the setting that you guys may want to update.
Settings - Privacy
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Microphone
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1645203662.jpg

Facebook (and anything else in the list that you think is a good idea)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1645203662.jpg

__________________________________________________ _______________
Then back out to the first layer of Settings, scroll way down to Facebook
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Microphone
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I generally go through every setting on my phone/PC because you never know what you'll find. And in some cases, the settings are in the phone OS and in other cases, the settings are in the app.

Here is how the device works:

The device itself is "listening" 100% of the time for the "wake word" (Alexa being the common one but you can choose others) so in that sense yes, it is "listening" all the time. It is not recording anything at this point.

Once it hears the wake word, it does start recording. It lets you know this by lighting up. It records until you stop talking (or pause too long, a common annoyance).

It then takes that recording and sends it off over the internet to the Amazon servers. The Amazon servers are where all of the real computing exists... that is where "Alexa" actually "listens" to your words in the recording, tries to guess at what you actually said, and decides how to respond appropriately. The response (whether it is a music stream or an answer to your question or whatever) is then sent back to your device. Point being, the device itself is basically a dumb terminal which can only
-listen for the wake word and create a subsequent recording to send to "the real Alexa"
-act as a speaker, playing back the response sent to it by "the real Alexa"
-store a small amount of settings/functionality e.g. if you set an alarm for 6AM and sometime during the night your internet goes down your alarm will still go off because that info is stored locally on the device itself. The device also stores stuff like your wifi info, which "wake word" you have configured, and some basic responses (like "I'm having trouble connecting to the internet")

That's everything.

If you think about this from a scientific method perspective (hypothesis: this device is actually making recordings and sending them to someone even when I did not use the wake word) one of the counterindications ("how would I know if my hypothesis were not true") is that the device relies 100% on your internet to communicate... there is no cell signal, radio or whatever used to emit info from the device (it does support bluetooth but you would need to set that up). So anyone who is knowledgeable about how the internet and networking works can attach the device to their internet and directly observe the "packets" emitted by the device. Audio recordings are not small, it would be readily apparent if there was something extra coming and going.

For longest time fb was feeding me ads for 'helium flow meters' and 'whole site voltage regulation'. I didn't know what they were, interesting, so I kept clicking. Weird industrial stuff. I still don't know what is special about a helium flow meter or who would want one.

Around december a year ago fb decided I was a different person, started getting ads for Kustom Choppers, Taverns across the country with Lady UFC-Style Fighting and.... hooters. Pretty damn disturbing stuff so I told it I never wanted to see that stuff. Now its just generic boring stuff that I don't notice. Occasionally white water kayaking stuff which is cool I guess.

I'd like to think the personal knowledge lets it feed me ads for stuff I want but wow to me the ad targeting seems utterly and completely inept.

Then again I have all the security stuff dialed down pretty far.

Deleting the app should work too.

Should.

Cool, thx. I know that Apple has "Hey, Siri" as a common/default wake word. And at some point in the past, there's now a setting that is available so you don't have to say "hey, siri." Does Alexa have something similar?

Besides, I don't think it's Alexa that's the problem in the OP, it's far more likely that it's the Facebook app on his phone.

I think Facebook sometimes tries to guess what you might be interested in (whether it's what's trending or "people that are interested in what you look at are also interested in XYZ" or what I don't know). I think if Facebook gives you an ad for XYZ and you click the ad, they'll then start feeding you more of those because you were interested. So when the one random ad for helium flow meters popped up and you clicked it, you opened the flood gates.

It's been a few years ago, but one morning I walked into the local convenience store for a pack of cigarettes. Standing in line at the cashier I happened to glance to the left and noticed the hot dog machine where they have hot dogs and sausages on heated rollers, a warming box for the buns next to it. I was kind of hungry and actually thought a couple of "gas station hot dogs" might fit the bill, but nah, I'll get something later on. So I turned my attention back towards the cashier.

Then I heard a "flop" sound.
I turned to look and here was a damn hot dog on the floor rolling towards me. :eek:

Then I actually noticed yet another one roll off the machine resulting in a "flop" on the floor and it was also rolling towards me! :eek::eek:

I thought what the hell is going on here?! I pointed it out to the cashier and asked her if "Google Mind Control 2.5 has already been released and why didn't I get the notice?!"

The cashier laughed and said "no, the girl that just finished her shift loaded the machine and she put the hot dogs in the same area as the sausages, and the sausages cause the hot dogs to get rolled off the machine. Happens all the time."! :D

queue

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Just about everything. In 2019 they got 'caught' but nothing changed.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18305378/amazon-alexa-ai-voice-assistant-annotation-listen-private-recordings
In many cases, human beings make those calls, by listening to a recording of the exchange and correctly labeling the data so that it can be fed back into the system. That process is very broadly known as supervised learning, and in some cases it’s paired with other, more autonomous techniques in what’s known as semi-supervised learning. Apple, Google, and Facebook all make use of these techniques in similar ways, and both Siri and Google Assistant improve over time thanks to supervised learning requiring human eyes and ears.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/03/amazon-quietly-adds-no-human-review-option-to-alexa-as-voice-ais-face-privacy-scrutiny/
The Alexa T&C did not previously inform users of the possibility that audio recordings captured by the service might be manually reviewed by actual humans. (Amazon still doesn’t appear to provide this disclosure on its main website either.)

Some people don't mind strangers(human or AI) listening in to every conversation made within their home. Their relationships. Their proprietary info.
Some might if they knew.
Some definitely do.

There is no time sure or Alexa are not supposed to be listening" short of pulling the power.

You need to get the Echo Show from Amazon.
Then you can let them see your bunion also.

I've had mine for close to two years now...You can use it for video calls easily.:)

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Yeah but then the kustom choppers, lady fighting and hooters? Not my bag at all. Can't imagine where it got evidence that I was into that.

Kustom Chopperz are just stupid. Women's MMA/boxing: sure, maybe, if they're any good, but hooters ads were by far the most disturbing, those red pants and vacant cow eyes. Ewww! Cree-Pee!

Is like it got me mixed up with someone else. Or maybe fb personality segued me from 'people that buy whole site voltage regulation' to their preferred entertainment.

Anyway, that stuffs gone now. Ads now are really lame, not anything I'd even consider clicking on.

So from my experience all this aparatus is broken, the personal data isn't being interpreted well enough to be dangerous. I guess thats good but its also sorta sad. What a waste of all that compute.

Main thing I get on YouTube that's strange is children's diapers for older kids that still wet their bed.

I'm 65 so I could see incontinence as a basis for adult diapers but I don't talk about it because I'm fortunate not to suffer from it.

Now that I said this there will be some huge news story tomorrow that those seniors that receive adolescent diaper ads are more than likely deeply closeted necrophiliacs.

It is true that (as described in the two articles you linked) it is possible a human at Amazon could manually review one of the recordings that you send (the "It then takes that recording and sends it off over the internet to the Amazon servers" step from my explanation) when the "Help Improve Alexa" setting is set to "on."

For that matter, you yourself can listen to all of them if you want (from your Alexa app go to Settings -> Alexa Privacy -> Review Voice History) and can change your settings to opt out of "Help Improve Alexa" or set it to auto delete all recordings immediately (from your Alexa app go to Settings -> Alexa Privacy -> Manage Your Alexa Data).

Personally I find it worrisome that the "Help Improve Alexa" setting is on by default (you can update your Alexa Privacy setting to opt out of any manual human review but by default you are opted in), much as I dislike that some software defaults to "share debugging info" by default which is comparable.

But were they "caught"... I wouldn't say so but up for debate I guess. In any case, a universe away from "my device is listening to my conversations and recording me when I am not asking it to record me and subsequently using the data for marketing."

Edit: additional note here, I'm sure to some of you it sounds like I'm shilling for Amazon and/or acting as some sort of fanboi. The truth is that I have lots of misgivings about the company and have no personal or financial stake in their success, nor have I been involved with them for some time. If Amazon imploded today I would be bummed on a personal level for the many people I still know there and perhaps there would be a knock-on effect with Seattle population and real estate, but you get the idea. Primarily trying to share what I know to help the rest of you get some better understanding of how this stuff works/how worried you should be.

Yep, unplug it.

That should work.