HN user

amznburn

30 karma
Posts1
Comments24
View on HN

Seems like a serious data privacy concern to me.

Are customers actually able to opt out of Amazon Sidewalk? Or is it the case that Amazon will continue to override customer settings for Ring and Alexa devices in order to achieve this mesh network?

"One must also assume that Amazon will do its best to encrypt its network traffic and make its devices as hard to hack as possible."

So far, Amazon says nothing when large volumes of customer data is leaked via vulnerable Alexa and Ring devices. Will Amazon be forced to disclose that it's systems are successfully attacked?

You must not have ever worked at Amazon. The issue you highlight from Google is "a first world problem," as the kids say. Amazon is low brow.

Amazon-Unveils-Q 3 years ago

Can I trust that Q's proposed AWS architecture solutions will be cost-effective?

No. Even in the Solutions Architect an Data Analyst Certification exams there are biases tested to essentially reinforce customers build in ways that ensure they spend more money. This model is no different. Amazon makes it incredibly difficult to opt out of any data collection across its AWS services, making user privacy a serious concern here. And, Amazon continues to fail to disclose to customers when their services/data has been compromised.

The "Q" model is incredibly underwhelming. ChatGPT continues to do a better job of describing and proposing viable solutions using AWS framework, and it's free.

As a customer, the guarantee you'll have with this model is KTLO. No thanks.

The system was redesigned so that ASR would handle the transcription and the "understanding." It never worked correctly, many many people complained, some people showed counter designs and data driven forecasts of catastrophic loss across multiple major areas. Those people were fired, the data was faked, and here we are today, with a broken Alexa. That said, it can "listen" and "see" quite well.

This is true, now. It is the case that Video, Music, and SmartHome teams took over much of Alexa support in middle of 2022/2023 (many other teams were fired), and the result is basic functionality such as "stop" doesn't work (music, timers, alarms), "play" goes to some random incorrect cache of Music or Video, not News. What happened to the data (including your feedback)? It disappears, of course. Nothing but SMILES (a program designed to only report positive trends and feedback) for Amazon leadership.

Alexa devices are spyware; they listen in on you, and if your device has a camera the camera can be accessed without your knowledge too.

Unplug this stuff already...

"Amazon pursues a pay-to-play scheme forcing sellers to buy ads. Worse, many of these ads are junk ads that aren’t relevant to what users search for. Jeff Bezos and co. call these Junk Ads “defects,” and sellers pay big bucks for them."

To be sure, it's Andy Jassy as CEO.

"Amazon.com Inc. doubled the number of junk ads to boost profits and deleted internal communications to thwart a federal antitrust probe"

Everything the FTC is saying here is true.

I monitored customer engagement across services including ads. I was instructed via numerous ticket streams and by numerous direct and skip managers to forge and delete data, for much of 2021 and 2022 [1]. Those tickets were then augmented and destroyed. We were also informed of new "30-day retention policies" with respect to internal communication threads on platforms such as Slack in 2021 (in addition to Signal). It's all true.

Anyone who tried to push back, escalate to senior leadership, and/or do their job successfully without committing federal/international crimes such as this was fired.

Amazonians, don't forget to blow the whistle: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower

[1]https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/380156/amazon...

These companies made billions of dollars via fake reviews. Only now they want to launch a global coalition? This is similar to how big tech wants to self-govern AI advancements; trust me bro. I am also concerned that Amazon is trying to leverage its auto-generation of review summary technology, without ever addressing the underlying concern: garbage in, garbage out. Further, this signals Amazon is going to have access to even more customer identifying information. As a consumer, this is unsettling.

There was a series of grotesque missteps before that which, in part, led to the layoffs. I think there's a few lawsuits that describe it. Forcing employees to either break federal/international laws or be fired is not a good look. Forcing employees to endure harassment, retaliation, and psychological abuse for a paycheck is not acceptable.

Here's a great example of how Amazon Alexa uses "ambient" settings to watch and listen whenever: https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12s32gz/does_alexa_l....

From 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/lsqti3/very_lon...

"Very long time Echo user starting to have a pretty negative (and questionable) experience"

"Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed all of our more recently purchased devices have suddenly started reacting very erratic with voice commands. It’s not one or two devices in particular, but almost all of them. Saying ‘Alexa’ even when standing next to the Show 10 will oftentimes trigger responses to a device across the house as if the spacial detection is off, but it makes no sense as the device reacting couldn’t have possibly heard you. Additionally, we’ve had a lot of false activations and pulling up the history usually presents “Audio was not intended for this device” or “audio could not be understood”, but the recordings have absolutely nothing to do with Alexa, nor is anything remotely close to it present, and sometimes there simply isn’t anything listed for review. In the past the false triggers were uncommon, but when they occurred, they were consistently presented in the app to review and generally made sense. I even had a situation this week where the device in my kitchen kept activating and I was repeatedly yelling “cancel” and the damn thing kept going. I ended up muting the mic for a day as it was so frustrating."

Additional customer reports:

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12oy2ch/alexa_gave_m...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/10urt54/strange_voic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/wvl63y/woke_up_to_em...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/13wlul7/alexa_decide...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/14d9qn5/alexa_making...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12v5c42/echo_dot_sta...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12krjeu/echo_show_ra...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/10hi8gp/why_did_my_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/10dezgl/echo_show_pl...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/14buu3x/song_quiz_gl...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/13mcgbv/im_having_pr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/rpdv5f/no_im_not_jok...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12qahzo/i_swear_my_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/rti8bb/not_sure_why_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/109kqh9/alexa_respon...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/10k1sn4/alexa_plays_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/10zubgn/echo_auto_vo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/1059n4h/light_random...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/14lbedt/alexa_blurts...

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/11qy6ls/my_alexa_sai...

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/11hz9l2/alexa_r...

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/s6c5a1/amazon_e...

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/whxb2j/why_are_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/rqlmry/alexa_ha...