Scary Alexa.

'Alexa, are you invading my privacy?' – the dark side of our voice assistants
There are more than 100m Alexa-enabled devices in our homes. But are they fun time-savers or the beginning of an Orwellian nightmare
Dorian Lynskey
Wed 9 Oct 2019 06.00 BST

One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. Josephson had not said the wake word – “Alexa” – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It was, he says, “Kafkaesque”.

This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee. Three years earlier, he had volunteered to sit in a room reciting a string of apparently meaningless phrases into a microphone for an undisclosed purpose. Only when Amazon released the Echo in the US in 2014 did he realise what he had been working on. He bought a Dot, the Echo’s cheaper, smaller model, after it launched in 2016, and found it useful enough until the day it went haywire. When the Dot’s outburst subsided, he unplugged it and deposited it in the bin. “I felt a bit foolish,” he says. “Having worked at Amazon, and having seen how they used people’s data, I knew I couldn’t trust them.”

The Dot wasn’t supposed to behave like a dadaist drill sergeant. Then again, voice assistants often do things that they are not supposed to do. Last year, an Amazon customer in Germany was mistakenly sent about 1,700 audio files from someone else’s Echo, providing enough information to name and locate the unfortunate user and his girlfriend. (Amazon attributed this “unfortunate mishap” to human error.)

In San Francisco, Shawn Kinnear claimed that his Echo activated itself and said cheerfully: “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” In Portland, Oregon, a woman discovered that her Echo had taken it upon itself to send recordings of private conversations to one of her husband’s employees. In a statement, Amazon said that the Echo must have misheard the wake word, misheard a request to send a message, misheard a name in its contacts list and then misheard a confirmation to send the message, all during a conversation about hardwood floors. Not great, Alexa.

Technology frequently inspires ambivalence: we know that Facebook and Google know too much about us, yet we continue to use their services because they’re so damn convenient. Voice assistants, however, are unusually polarising. People who consider them sinister and invasive (myself included) regard enthusiasts as complacent, while those who find them useful and benign see the sceptics as paranoid technophobes. There is one question freighted with bigger issues about our relationship with the tech industry: should you let Alexa into your home?
Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... assistants

Reminds me of 1977 Demon Seed - Incredibly Prophetic

Anyone here married to a Cambodian girl called Alexa. ?

Alexa - can me hear me

You - are - the - Devil - incarnate.
Got that? remember it please.

...and everybody else too

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2019 8:30 am Alexa - can me hear me

You - are - the - Devil - incarnate.
Got that? remember it please.

...and everybody else too

are you telling everybody else to remember that Alexa ("You") is "the - Devil - incarnate."?
or are you saying that everybody else, as well as Alexa ("You") is the devil incarnate?

^^^ Sorry V, 'was telling smart Alexa she has horns :
and that she should never forget it and come to think she was an angel instead.

And warning everybody else not to forget that either.
(imo only of course)

China brings in mandatory facial recognition for mobile phone users

All mobile phone users in China registering new SIM cards must submit to facial recognition scans, according to a new rule that went into effect across the country on Sunday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... hone-users

It's the scourge of tyrannical desires. They will tell you it's normal. They might also tell you 17 genders exist while at the same time telling you males can have babies.

Experiment and look at Men's Health magazines where it describes in small sections how to please a man by b sucking. How to imoress your friends? Just happens to be there. You want more proof? Try mainstream media...or their brothers on arms search engines and "social network sites"

I searched, being the typical man, something like Brunette nice feet perfect a- - and then hit the photos button on one search engine and was shocked at how WAY off they were as towards my predilection. But, the pictures with captions stating alternative to what I liked had the best pictures in all regards, and the pictures that were nothing what I requested in search usually had captions that WERE related to my search. Not mentioning alternative words. Go have a look yourself. You are being indoctrinated to do, say and think exactly what they want. It's just another show of love from.... The Deep State Satanic Marxists...

Around 3 years ago I read a story,
a family on the east coast of the US was watching a movie when the phone rang it was friends on the West Coast asking if they were enjoying the movie?
Perplexed they asked how they knew what they were watching, answer Alexa told us.
Amazon mumbled something about they would look into it, never saw a follow-up article.

Would never by an Amazon product.