Current Events > How do you feel about the Amazon Echo?

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I am completely against all of the home assistants. It's not paranoia about the government (though Amazon won't say whether they cooperate with or receive requests to use the Echo for wiretapping), it's about the very issue that people are buy low cost devices that sit in a room and can hear everything you say in the privacy of your own home. Currently, all signs point to Amazon not recording more than it claims to, and you do have the ability to see what has been recorded and delete what you don't like. But that could change at any time. Once, Windows didn't monitor everything you do with telemetry. From this angle, the low cost kind of bothers me.

Beyond Amazon or the government acting in bad faith, there is the real problem of hacking. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are notoriously insecure, and the Echo could easily be turned into a listening device by hackers in the future. Because speech to text is a thing, they wouldn't even need to choose you as a target specifically. A large number of Echos could be hacked and mined for juicy data without any direct interest in you personally.

I also don't see that they add much value, especially considering the risks involved. What do you guys think?

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