Following on from a comment in another post, does Alexa spy on its users in a malevolent way?
Iâm not sure, but it does process and understand words spoken before saying âAlexaâ, which means itâs probably processing everything that is being said. I found this out last week when in the UK at my brother and sister in laws. They have Alexa and use it a lot for various things. As a joke, after it was used several times, I said âthank you Alexaâ and Alexa replied âno problemâ 
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Whether malevolent or not, the truth is we donât know and canât really find out. Once the microphones are on, all these devices, Alexa, Siri, Google assistant and cars, Hello BMW, Reno in Renaults, etc. are listening and pushing data up the line for processing. Itâs great that I can tell Alexa to turn on the garage lights, play Radio 4 or set a timer so I donât burn the dinner. But somewhere in Amazon datacentres (they have 31% of the $300-billion market which is growing at 21 percent per year) it is stored that you (identified by your Amazon account) played radio 4 at HH hour on YY day.
It is amazing they the fictional government surveillance via television in Orwellâs 1984 that shocked everyone has come about through a private company, and er have paid for the devices ourselves 
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Absolute genius on the part of our masters to convince the masses to pay for and fasten their own chains.
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Iâve got two of them in my home, better not walk around without clothes on in case they can see me and get a terrible fright. 
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As far as I can tell, Alexa gives you total control over what you want it to save via the privacy controls. If you use a smartphone, It would seem that the risks of unknowingly sharing data are far greater.
I suggest that providing I am careful about financial security and do not indulge in nefarious activity any information that might be gleaned would have little impact on my life apart from targeted adverts about care homes and funeral plans.
I find Alexa controls very clunky. Because Iâm basically a bored techie I have a lot of stuff unnecessarily automated and linked together over three locations, and mostly managed through Alexa and Echos.
The Echo Show 8 we put in the kitchen even knew when I walked into the room (camera I guess) and said âHello Johnâ (very 2001). I found out how to turn that off pretty damn quickly 
Iâd prefer to use Apple Home because I do (maybe naively) trust Apple and I donât even remotely trust Bezos, but I donât like the Home app or its organisation, though I might have another look.
Based on your âwakeup callâ topic, I will have another look at Alexa privacy settings, especially as it now wants to learn my voice so it can âtarget meâ with tailored content
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âIâm sorry, John, Iâm afraid I can do that.â
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Todayâs photography trivia fact: the part of HAL 9000âs red eyeball in the film â2001 A Space Odysseyâ was played by a Nikon 8mm F8 fisheye lens. 
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We try to manage with old fashioned approaches as much as we can without being completely weird as the environmental impact of these things is huge.
I found this interesting
https://envirobites.org/2019/09/10/alexa-whats-your-carbon-footprint/
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Donât view that as âweirdâ - it seems normal to me - a cat, a dog and a wife is enough to deal with, without adding disembodied AI personas to the household.
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Thanks for sharing this. My partner is retraining as a CSR consultant. She constantly tells me how much each ChatGPT search costs on carbon footprint, so Iâm sure sheâll appreciate this article too.
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I found the article rather alarmist
âBehind every voice assistant are also hundreds of thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.â seems to infer that every time someone gets a voice assistant thousands of pounds of CO2 is emitted. The fact is that those emissions have already been emitted in setting up the current network. So the more voice assistants are purchased the less can be attributed to an individual assistant.
âCan you guess how much carbon was emitted to get you a fully-functioning Alexa in your home?â Why not come upfront and tell us! Every manufactured item has a carbon footprint. There is more of a carbon footprint making a smart phone than an Echo Dot.
âAll this time taken to train and develop algorithms can be directly translated to kilowatt hours used. The research team found that training such a computer model contributes to around 630,000 pounds of CO 2 emissions â, Yes, that is a huge amount, but over how many installations is that spread. It is a bit like quoting the emissions of a family car and including all the exploration, refining and retailing of the fuel to run it.
What I am interested in is, if I ask a simple question of ChatGPT such as âwhat is the weight of 3.3 cups of flour measured in grams?â how much carbon will I generate? The answer I get is that it depends on the complexity of the request but typically 0.5 to 5 grams.
Of course most of the calculations of the carbon footprint uses the footprint of the electricity consumed to generate the power used. This depends on whether the power comes from renewables (which is where we are all heading) or fossil fuels.
AI is used extensively to give us a far better understanding of the causes of climate change. So ironically, it is solving its own problems.
Having got the subject into perspective, I will continue to use Alexa with a clear(ish) conscience.
I suspect that cryptocurrency mining uses a heck of a lot more power than Alexa.
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After the One Coin scandal I could never trust crypto currency and I still do not understand what a blockchain is.
Itâs simple Mik. Itâs just a sequential ledger of transactions that is replicated across so many nodes that it cannot (yet) be fiddled or corrupted.
The technology was one (not rocket science) thing, but thatâs not what we can learn from it, and other innumerable "high techâ bullshits. The latest is the totally misnamed âAIâ. This too will pass leaving a modicum of progress behind it, and another super hyped bullshit will come along. The objective is share/option value enhancing, not technological progress.
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We were staying at a friendâs last year. There was an Alexa in the bedroom. We had just woken up and were drinking a coffee when Alexa said âIâm sorry I didnât understand thatâ or something similar. Really??? Just freaky.
That occasionally happens to us. I suppose a combination of sounds and the way the software works.