[Mike D. aka jmiked]

I am slowly moving away from using Alexa at my house. I have three Echoes in various rooms, and I'm not doing anything with them but I could not ultimately do via Siri, and do more securely. I am becoming increasingly disturbed by the revelations concerning Amazon employees having access to voice recordings from Alexa. Same for Google Home, I gave up on them a while ago. I don't have a Google Home and I have removed all Google apps/data from my computer and from my mobile.

If it turns out Apple is doing the same thing, then I'm sunk.

 

[johannesrexx]

We share a common concern for our data privacy. IMHO we cannot trust Amazon, Facebook, Google or Microsoft to not peek at our very personal data. Those companies will swear up and down about their privacy policies, data anonymization and administrative and technical safeguards. But at the end of the day it's software they control and insiders have the means to work around them. After all, they built it.

Those companies are routinely compelled to surrender customer data by agents Smith and Johnson bearing a warrant or a national security letter. Given recent revelations regarding deep state actors in the heart of the federal government that means privacy-conscious users must avoid facebook Portal, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

This leaves two choices. Apple Siri and the Mycroft Mark II. Apple has made very serious commitments to data privacy and has fingered the FBI to prove it. But it's a completely proprietary solution and the next Apple CEO might not be as committed to customer privacy. This leaves the open source Mycroft as the only remaining solution one can depend on.

People would be amazed at how much Amazon, facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple know about us. I've personally obtained my data from facebook, Google and Apple. Only Apple retains data necessary to provide its services. Google and facebook retain far too much personal information for my tastes.

Therefore I deleted my facebook account years ago, don't use any Microsoft products at all, have deleted all Google software from my iPhone, iPad and Macintosh, and search with DuckDuckGo. Amazon is a problem because my better half loves the company's services. And of course I'm hook line and sinker with Apple.

We do what we can 

 

[Sandpiper]

I'm not techie (enough or any?) to understand how much "everyone" knows about me.  Does it matter that much?  I go on living my life as usual.  I remember when Amazon first started.  Everyone was up-in-arms that they could track your purchases.  Horrors!!  But at that time grocery store(s) had been tracking purchases with reward card for a while.  What was / is the big deal about Amazon doing it?

As far as what you say to Echo / Alexa, go into History in the Alexa app.  It's there in print on your computer screen.

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

I believe it does matter that much. Personal information gathered by companies will be used for their benefit, not yours. Their primary purpose is not providing a service to you, it's maximizing value for their shareholders regardless of consequences to customers. And the information they have on you seems to be routinely accessed by hackers.

 

[johannesrexx]

I'm not techie (enough or any?) to understand how much "everyone" knows about me. Does it matter that much? I go on living my life as usual.

There are multiple concerns with not knowing what data DataHordingCompany has on us.

So long as our personal data remains sequestered at DataHordingCompany our life will go on as usual. But in the past unscrupulous DataHordingCompany employees have used data for personal profit. And neither of us knows if the large screen TV that was stolen last year was because an insider at DataHordingCompany shared that information with a crime ring.

Then we have those incredibly common data breaches with millions of impacted users having their personal data stolen.

And how long before the deep state demands a direct feed into DataHordingCompany's data lake and starts doing predictive analytics with AI deep learning on every customer because they voted for the wrong presidential candidate?

We can ignore the potential problems and go on living our lives or we can start taking steps to take control over our personal data. Start your journey and become an EFF member (https://www.eff.org/).

 

[mlewis78]

I never use Siri. It comes up on my iphone when I have not requested it. I am OK with Alexa, but it should not say extra things when I ask for the time. You can ask it to delete previous recordings (through the app -- it won't do it when I ask verbally) and it will delete them.

Unfortunately, my iphone keeps more info about me than Amazon ever will. The iphone doesn't keep that info to itself.

 

[inmymind]

I used Alexa for some time, but somehow I had the feeling that I could be bugged all the time. At some point we stopped using it because we didn't use it much either... We now rely on other music streaming services...