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You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!"

In this case it wasn't even the NSA I was thinking about, rather Amazon themselves.

"Hey, I'm heading to the grocery store, do you need anything?"

"Yeah, get some milk?"

<user requires milk approximately every 4 days, enter "send Amazon Fresh promo e-mail" event for 3.5 days from now>

Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term.

You don't know that. This is not going to be a piece of open source software you can evaluate. It's Amazon's literal black box to do with what they wish.




Its not really a black box, you still conceivably own the network it is running on. Last I checked Wireshark was pretty good at capturing network traffic. Even if the connection is encrypted, if the device isn't sending oodles of data to Amazon when you are chatting chances are good it isn't send "every word" to them.

Granted, being able to audit this directly ourselves instead of observing it in other ways would be nice.


It's possible that the device will transcribe and record the text of everything, and then only send it upstream in batches along with the consumer-useful chatter. Over a TLS link, that would look quite innocuous.




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