I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day

https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1963803025572770212

by tosh • 11 months ago

142 109 11 months ago

mrlinx2• 11 months ago

In 2025, can't believe there's still no open-source alternative to these devices.

verytrivial• 11 months ago

They're hardware projections into your living space of a massive system run by Amazon. It's the massive system that open-source will have trouble replicating.

mrlinx2• 11 months ago

Spotify multi-speaker playing + a LLM answering questions would cover what 80% of people need.

herculity275• 11 months ago

Most people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.

danilopopeye• 11 months ago

I’ve been meaning to try the Home Assistant new voice control[1] for a while. Do you consider it open-source enough? :)

1. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/

NoboruWataya• 11 months ago

The most serious project I knew in this space was Mycroft, but I just looked it up and they ceased development due to a patent troll.

general14652• 11 months ago

What would be the use case?

IAmBroom• 11 months ago

The same as Amazon's devices. Odd question.

toast03• 11 months ago

Voice activated timers / clocks and unit conversions are handy in the kitchen.

victorbjorklund• 11 months ago

Not exactly the same but there is Home assistant voice.

zahlman• 11 months ago

It's still honestly amazing to me that people buy, or want, devices like this, even before considering the downsides. I mean, I don't even like leaving voicemail messages. So the idea of talking to nobody in particular, within my own home, to cause something to happen, totally freaks me out. I really don't need more excuses for physical laziness, either.

rickdeckard2• 11 months ago

It might be used as a hub for other devices via Amazon sidewalk [0]...

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk

diggan3• 11 months ago

Seems that'd be easy to confirm, and also seems unlikely to be the reason because of the supposed limits in place.

Customers can turn Sidewalk on or off at any time from Control Center in the Ring app or Account Settings in the Alexa app
The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.

tinix• 11 months ago

Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.

luma• 11 months ago

Sidewalk is LoRA so I think we can be pretty sure it wasn't the source of GBs of data . Anyone freaked out about sidewalk's use of their internet connection hasn't looked at the numbers.

CharlesW• 11 months ago

LoRa is Sidewalk's long-haul backup layer, but it uses a mix of BLE, FSK, and LoRa depending on the distance and data requirements.

https://docs.sidewalk.amazon/introduction/

jeroenhd2• 11 months ago

I imagine it may contribute to data usage for some people, but from his Youtube videos I don't exactly get the impression this guy gets a lot of foot traffic near his house.

maxclark• 11 months ago

He also has a 25 Gbps Internet connection - not really a huge problem here

diggan3• 11 months ago

That's really besides the point, unused devices shouldn't upload/download GB of data per month, it's really simple :)

egorfine• 11 months ago

You never use them.

Unlike Amazon.

GJim• 11 months ago

"Smart speakers" should be called by their real name: Smart microphones.

Echo --> Amazons microphone.

brador• 11 months ago

Listening devices

ozgung• 11 months ago

All smartphones are also smartmicrophones.

Phrenzy• 11 months ago

doubleplusgood

juliangmp2• 11 months ago

Yeah? I mean that's their purpose, why is this surprising to anyone?

lupusreal2• 11 months ago

Usually when this sort of scenario is brought up as a concern, the corporate sycophants crawl out of their holes to gaslight everybody.

juliangmp2• 11 months ago

Idk what drugs you're on to think I'm some kind of amazon shill. My point stands, acting surprised about any of this is just nonsense. You bought the Amazon Smart Spying Speakers, what the fuck do you expect them to do

noisy_boy• 11 months ago

Provocative: Then why haven't you turned them off?

nickthegreek• 11 months ago

i dont understand how people can setup this level of monitoring but not also a pihole.

chrisandchris• 11 months ago

Not OP, but if you've got a Ubiquiti device, this is out-of-box (and they're easier to setup than printer WiFi).

stevage4• 11 months ago

They probably have now? Nothing weird about posting a "whoa look what I just discovered".

nizbit2• 11 months ago

And all defaults set? Yeah you’re gonna have a bad time.

Disable voice recording storage Disable "Help Improve Alexa" Manage skill permissions Turn off Amazon Sidewalk

But in the end you have a 3rd party passive listening device. Depends if you trust that 3rd party I guess.

And after that post on x, I’m sure that person disconnected all the Alexa’s in their home right?

HPsquared2• 11 months ago

Most people already have a phone, laptop, maybe a watch, maybe the TV remote.. And lots of apps on each one. Any one of which could be listening in. It's a crazy situation.

m463• 11 months ago

I remember years ago, when viruses were common, watching kids use computers...

Install

[X]

Upgrade

and they never want to clear their cookies and lose their logins.

ptx• 11 months ago

Android has a button in the quick settings bar to enable/disable the microphone, which helps with this (as long as you trust the OS itself). I keep it disabled most of the time.

oarla• 11 months ago

I wish my phone was just listening. It’s actually much worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802

Cthulhu_• 11 months ago

At least the phones, at least theoretically, will ask first and/or show an indicator when they're recording.

IlikeKitties3• 11 months ago

I don't want to life in a world where i have to setup DMZs, filters and special magic incantations to use my devices without them turning into literal spying device listening to every word i say. What the fuck.

jychang• 11 months ago

Meh, your smartphone is already the ultimate spying device that comes with microphones and triangulates your location from 3 cell towers. The government doesn’t need more spyware than that.

jamesnorden• 11 months ago

That would start with not buying a literal spy device from Amazon.

0cf8612b2e1e• 11 months ago

We are already here. As the volume of code/technology increases, it should be clear that systems need strong permission boundaries. It is impossible to meaningfully audit all dependencies and services.

If my desktop music player has an exploit, it should not be possible that it can read my SSH keys. Node supply chain hacks keep occurring where your development environment can leak your private data. Mobile OS have this isolation already, but desktop is sure to slowly follow. I think we might eventually get to a point where even code libraries get assigned capabilities (eg libxml does not have network access).

gucci-on-fleek4• 11 months ago

I also monitor the bandwidth of each device on my network, and my numbers are much lower than his. The totals that I observed over the last 90 days:

  Device         Download     Upload
  ===========  ==========  =========
  Echo Show A   5.487 GiB  1.451 GiB
  Echo Show B   4.343 GiB  1.293 GiB
  Echo A        0.778 GiB  0.739 GiB
  Echo Dot      0.626 GiB  0.580 GiB
  Echo B        0.132 GiB  0.291 GiB
  -----------  ----------  ---------
  Total        11.366 GiB  4.354 GiB

Also note that both devices in the OP are called "echoshow", which means that they have a full LCD display that you could theoretically stream videos on (if you like watching videos on a 5" display with a terrible interface).

HPsquared2• 11 months ago

Is that usage from doing video calls or streaming?

gucci-on-fleek4• 11 months ago

No, I essentially only use it for announcements and turning on/off the lights (with some very occasional music streaming). The bandwidth usage appears to be mostly constant 24/7, so I'm not really sure why it's using so much data (but still much less than the OP).

diggan3• 11 months ago

Are you also "never using them" like OP and they send/receive that much data? Curious what it is since the Sidewalk thing seems to be limited to 500MB across your account.

gucci-on-fleek4• 11 months ago

I use them multiple times daily, but essentially only for things like "turn off the lights", "set a timer for 30 minutes", or "add cheese to my shopping list". But “Echo A” is probably my most-used device, so usage doesn't seem to be very correlated with the bandwidth consumed.

donatj• 11 months ago

Came here to say the same. We use our echos a fair bit but our data use is a fraction of that.

AnotherGoodName• 11 months ago

Fwiw i've had long running devices that just constantly ARP broadcast. Affects the local network only but if that's how you measure bandwidth you'll notice it.

Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle.

Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve.

Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)

chatmasta2• 11 months ago

I wouldn't trust flipping the fuse to the house because of thundering herd issues. When I restart my router I first disconnect all WiFi clients and unplug the Ethernet connections. Then I let it do its thing, download its mysterious updates, etc. Only when it's solidly online do I reconnect the clients one by one...

IIsi50MHz2• 11 months ago

reboot the house […] flip the […] breaker

My gran's power company doesn't like this. When I flipped the main breaker, they saw the load drop and scheduled a crew to investigate and repair[1]. We found out when they called to tell us off after they saw the load restored in few minutes.

[1] It's an old house and hard to tell which outlets and lights are on which circuits, and which of the multiply-rewritten labels in the breaker panel are true, so the main breaker seemed the easiest way…

bazmattaz3• 11 months ago

What tool do you use to track bandwidth usage on your network?

x2tyfi• 11 months ago

Also curious about this

gucci-on-fleek4• 11 months ago

I run nlbw2collectd [0] on an OpenWRT router, and then scrape the data with a standard VictoriaMetrics/Grafana setup. It gives me really nice charts showing when each device is active and how much data it is using.

[0] https://github.com/mstojek/nlbw2collectd

neuroelectron• 11 months ago

Seems like something is seriously wrong. This is not normal. It's not caused by "improving Alexa" or Sidewalk.

cubefox2• 11 months ago

By the way, "that person" is Dave Plummer, an ex Microsoft employee. He made things like the Windows Task Manager and the infamous file copy window. His YouTube channel has interesting behind the scenes information on historical Windows decisions.

IlikeKitties3• 11 months ago

Oh it's that guy? yeah, there's another thing he did: Write scammy Scareware [0] which he got sued [1] for and settled [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 [1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/ne [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1593468/internetshield...

cubefox2• 11 months ago

Still arguably a minor sin compared to his botched file copy time estimation algorithm. :)

techjamie• 11 months ago

It makes me sad that video doesn't have 100k views at least. He tried so hard to bury it and it kinda worked, but it's a well put together documentary on the stuff he pulled in the 00s.

It'd be one thing if he owned up to it and admitted what he did was wrong but he's grown past it. His attempts to obscure it away just tell me he hasn't changed. Which is funny, because his videos gave me a grifter vibe I couldn't quite place until I learned about his history.

greyface-• 11 months ago

[1] appears truncated, I think you meant: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

nizbit2• 11 months ago

So what if it’s Dave Plummer? The name doesn’t make the post any stronger. The problem with his screenshot is the lack of context — network usage by itself doesn’t prove anything malicious or even unusual. Devices like Echo Shows pull constant updates, stream visuals, cache media, and maintain active connections. That can easily add up to gigabytes, even if the owner never directly ‘uses’ them. Acting shocked about it without explaining the why just turns into clickbait.

dang• 11 months ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45136997.)

marcroberts• 11 months ago

I had a similar issue 2 years ago[0], tracked it down to a device metrics hostname and then blacklisted the DNS for it. That stopped the huge data use and seemed to have zero affect on the device functioning. It's still working just fine today with that host blocked.

[0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...

1oooqooq• 11 months ago

person buys the literal telescreen from 1984, and is surprised it's the telescreen he paid for.

color me shocked.

advael• 11 months ago

We have an impossibly pervasive network of sensor blisters littered throughout our lives, to the point where I don't feel comfortable discussing certain sensitive topics in most other people's homes, but every step of the way most normal people have given the same refrain: "oh, the tech companies probably already have all my data anyway"

Now that those tech companies are working closely with an American regime that seems increasingly willing to disregard the rule of law and public perception to round up people they deem undesirable in large numbers and put them in concentration camps, and we have natural language processing tech that can pretty effectively filter through large amounts of text for some semantic analysis, I hear some of the more attentive people coming to the barest hint of a realization that this situation is unacceptably dire

It really seems to me like we are cooked

pointlessone• 11 months ago

doing nothing at all

Doing nothing at all for you.

xnx• 11 months ago

I can only imagine that much data usage if it was trying to compress a 24 hour recording of white noise.

rickdeckard2• 11 months ago

Could possibly be solved by blocking connections to device-metrics-us.amazon.com (via the router or a pihole), the devices tend to be quite chatty towards that domain but don't seem to be affected in function if they can't reach it...

burnt-resistor• 11 months ago

Because they continually download and serve commercial ads, upload telemetry, and upload everything they hear regardless of wake word with no way of deleting (per a past privacy-invasive EULA change).

At a minimum, disable the microphone via the switch... which makes them basically worthless and so they've outlived their usefulness.

tombert• 11 months ago

I used to have the Rumble app installed [1], and I uninstalled it when I saw it was using gigs and gigs of data on my phone, even when I wasn't using the app. I'm sure I opted into some permission at some point, but I really didn't like the idea of them constantly sending data to their site at the expense of my data plan and battery, so I removed it.

Now I think this stuff is the norm though; I guess bandwidth is so abundant and cheap for the average American that they don't realize how much is actually being used?

[1] I'm not conservative but there was a creator I liked that was banned from YouTube and was uploading to Rumble.

sh4rks• 11 months ago

Does anybody have suggestions for a device similar to the echo, but with no microphone? I want whole house speakers on a budget, and the Echo's music group feature seems to do what I want, but I have no need for the microphone.

conception• 11 months ago

Sonos/Ikea?

bazmattaz3• 11 months ago

Sonos One SL has no microphone.

de6u99er• 11 months ago

This is click ait, right?

LorenPechtel2• 11 months ago

Echo show--of course it uses a decent amount of data. If it's awake it will typically be showing an ad on at least part of it's screen. Some of those have images.

stevage4• 11 months ago

Wow, people have devices that show ads all day? Vomit.

johnisgood5• 11 months ago

Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Why would anyone do this deliberately to themselves is beyond me.

LorenPechtel2• 11 months ago

I have mine configured so the majority of the screen is useful information. There's a third of it that shows ads, so what? I just ignore them.

ThePowerOfFuet• 11 months ago

https://xcancel.com/davepl1968/status/1963803025572770212

huem0n• 11 months ago

Thank you

procaryote• 11 months ago

Well this easily happens and is just the result of a simple mistake: you bought an amazon echo

This is easily fixed by disconnecting and shredding any such devices you own!

I hope this helps!

mikelward• 11 months ago

I set up a Google Home to show family photos for my grandma.

Got a call soon after that it'd used her monthly home internet allowance.

I guess it didn't cache the wallpaper images.

theoreticalmal2• 11 months ago

I was able to effectively stop this behavior by shooting my Echo with a rifle. I hope to hang its rent carcass above my fireplace soon

kogasa240p• 11 months ago

I'm sorry but what was expected here? They're designed to be corporate wiretap devices.

motbus3• 11 months ago

I ditched having any smart stuff I can avoid. One of my best friends on the other hand has everything he can, or he had. I don't know. The amount of cameras and the lack of security upgrades on those devices gives me chills.

I have been worried about it since I found my ISP router back in the day spent 10G/week by itself when nothing is connected. Wtf

I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day

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