We’re moving from getting services for free that are taking all of our data to paying for services that are taking all of our data.<p>It’s honestly ridiculous and only government intervention will prevent this from getting out of hand.
Alexa feels like like one of those devices that everyone (tech & non-tech people alike) understand to be an always-on recording device, and a proof point that many people do, in fact, choose convenience over privacy.
I get that there should be logs.. for debugging and feature tracking etc... I don't think its reasonable for the "voice" to be stored and available to 3rd parties. The system beyond speech to text doesn't respond to voice, it responds to text. So couldn't they just have the logs of the commands put into the system in text? And once the voice is converted + is processed to make the system better, automatically deleted? The voice should only be accessible by the amazon core service responsible for speech to text, the voice shouldn't leave that system, and again, once in text, the text, or commands, can be logged / shared with relevant "skills" providers, since they'd have logs of your interactions with their systems anyways.
This is obviously bad, but I think the deeper problem is with Android that it's impossible to turn off the long-home-button press behavior. The wiretapping statutes really need to be updated to cover "negligent wiretapping" and require manufacturers to provide an opt-out toggle that prevents it.<p>Alexa speakers, of course, are surveillance devices and if you have it on it seems fair to say you have opted in.
In other words, they don't have a way for consumers to set a retention policy, like businesses typically do for email. You have to delete things manually.<p>It seems pretty clear that there are lots of people who want this and I'd be surprised if more companies don't start doing it. Snapchat made its name with auto-deleting videos.
They have tons of people working full time to classify the recordings to use as training data. Of course they aren't going to delete them automatically and waste millions of dollars of work.