I switched to Home Assistant a couple months ago (because I didn't like the idea of my voice being sent to amazon constantly) and haven't looked back! Soo much more you can do (including immediately using an LLM, if you like, whether in the cloud or local), and so much more control.
The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.
"
Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”?
A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ...
"
They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...
Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"
Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?
For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D
Home Assistant is a great example of the amazing things the open source community is capable of doing. Hopefully they get the color version stuff worked out. It's too bad it appears that most of Amazon's hardware devices can't be turned to the good side and made to work with Home Assistant.
As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!
Data sovereignty in general is always a good decision. I love my HA device, my local inference for LLMs on my 3090, my homelab of services, and the FTP access to my PikaPods workloads.
If you don't have full control over your data, someone else does - and will do as they please with it, eventually.
We mostly use Alexa for playing music (Radio & Spotify) and setting timers.
We also use the multi-room music feature where Alexa plays the same audio source on a certain group (great for parties).
There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.
OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].
I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..
It has some of those features. I think I’d attach speakers to the HA Voice you can use them that way but the built-in speaker will not cut it (think gen1 Echo).
They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.
Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how
"I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization."
Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that's a hardware mute.
Yeah, companies are like that - they'll lie and pretend to be "the good guys" at the start, right up until they're not and change their motto to something besides "don't be evil".
As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.
I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..
I feel you on prioritizing moral work! It took me a long time in my career to finally be able to make that choice (versus taking the first job I could find). I had an extremely moral open source robotics job for 5.5 years and then had to leave and take a less moral but still I think positively moral startup job. I think it’s okay to prioritize your personal financial needs sometimes. In the long term you won’t do the immoral stuff that long if this is how you think - so your own will provides a check to make sure you won’t do it too long.
It's not possible to work for a moral company because it's the government that's immoral and is responsible for corrupting them. Tech is basically the whipping boy for all the government's misdeeds. The government forces tech companies to be dirty (it's against the law to say no to them) and then inflames the public to blame the tech companies for doing it, so that people hate tech and love the government. It's like blaming the hand of the person whipping you while kissing their feet. So until the government stops being evil, there's no ethically safe space for tech workers. We'll just continue to be passed around and used as spoils of war by one twisted regime after another.
This is interesting because I remember interviewing a UX manager candidate at Google around 2019 who was coming from the Alexa team at Amazon, and his feedback even then was that Alexa was never going to be profitable and that he -- and many others -- were trying to get out while the getting was good. It, just like Google Assistant, is just suffering a very slow death.
Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)
As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.
And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.
People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart phones, the surveillance of modern stores, etc. All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate. But not buying an echo is effortless and free. There's no cost associated with not buying one, and not spending the time to set it up.
But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.
It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.
When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.
I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.
> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
>This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...",
That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.
I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.
Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.
"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them.
What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.
There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.
The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.
> It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government
... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).
People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.)
This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism, often becoming nihilistic. But the practical truth is that people don't care about philosophy or politics. Human society's default is authoritarianism. Rather than be upset at this impulse, it would be wiser to acknowledge with amazement that we managed to try something different. Civilization will struggle with it's default settings for as long as civilization exists, and our role is fight against them, knowing the fight is never over.
I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.
A columnist I read brought this up recently mocking a bunch of Silicon Valley execs supporting monarchism, presumably thinking they would be the educated elite monarchs. His point was that they hadn't invented anything new . . . monarchy is literally one of the oldest ideas in human history.
Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.
Some people have enjoyed the benefits of government agencies that promote consumer protections. At some level, maybe we hear about or even directly benefitted from some consumer protection agency, and assume the government has our back. Maybe it is naive, but I still think that assumption is there: we don't have to care because it is someone else's job to care about privacy. How could it be put on sale if it is not safe? They test cars, for safety, they test food for safety, etc. They must test these things, too, right?
This is clearly not the case, though. The government works for big tech. The US government is even shutting down consumer protection agencies at the behest of big tech and leaving us to their whims!
> This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.
Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.
People should care about climate change, that's different from whether people do care about it.
More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.
For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.
There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.
People might not care, but it also might be that they are not aware. Telemetry and data collection are cleverly hidden by app developers. Imagine if for example a phone would show messages like "Sending your data to Company X" every time it sends a telemetry. That would make people more aware.
What I think is hard for a lot of tech people to understand is that people don't care about privacy in the abstract. "Your data is being read and stored" isn't interesting to most people unless they know what it's being used for. And, often, to the surprise of the kind of person reading this, they are totally fine with how their data is being used. They don't care that the government is listening in for anti-terror activities. They don't care that corporations are aggregating their data to sell ads. They don't think it's a big deal.
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy
Yea, so, looks like they do care.
> they never would have purchased this product in the first place
They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.
> Social Media,
I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.
> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate
Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.
> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.
> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.
If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).
Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.)
As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa).
(PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).
"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.
And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).
Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.
> People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy.
Your second sentences proves that the first is a lie. People very clearly care about their privacy. These surveillance systems are designed so that users never see the line between the collection of their private data and the consequences. People are upset when they know that their privacy has been violated, but Amazon tells them that they are safe and they never see the contractor working for Amazon listening to them having sex so they don't have the sense of outrage that they should.
Amazon is exploiting well known and researched limitations of human's brain/perception and they've crafted their marketing to be as manipulative and reassuring as possible to keep people bugging their own homes with their devices. It's a little unfair to blame the public being fleeced and not the multi-billion dollar corporation who has devoted unimaginable resources into manipulating the customers they are screwing over. You and I know better than to fall for their bullshit, but it's easy to see how most will struggle.
Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)
Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?
We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?
Yeah, people care about privacy, and a lot of other things, but generally lack the organization and resources to do much.
Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.
Nobody buys apple because of privacy they buy it because its a status symbol and stupidly easy to use. All the privacy marketing is there just to feel even more superior to those plebian android user that can have a factually and verifiably private OS with android forks like GrapehenOS for people who actually care.
Majority user care about privacy the same way they care about the environment with apples greenwashing. One marketing line is sufficient.
"They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this."
They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.
My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.
People (including me) are simply ignorant of the privacy implications of their actions, even tech savvy people like me can't really understand who is watching and collecting their data and when, and won't go to extreme lengths in preventing others from listening in.
Regular folks are even less aware and are scared by technology - when a scary popup comes up, they will press anything and agree to anything just to make it go away.
>People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that.
A big reason for this is that no one really explains what happens and why people should care.
Typically, it's either a hand-wave to "this should be important, you should care", or steeped in so much technical detail that the non-technical listener has a hard time wrapping their head around it. (The third way it's explained is via a bunch of conspiracy theory/NSA stuff, which probably just turns most people off entirely).
Worse, people have been in a dozen breaches in the last few years, but the majority haven't suffered a personal impact (yet). Further reinforcing "why should I care?".
Yes, but "social media" is a broad spectrum. On one end you have "profile-less" social media, like forums, and the other end is "profile-rich" social media, like Facebook. The privacy implications of the latter are far worse than the former.
The test for me in defining social medial is whether its core is based a graph of connections. This is where you lose control in, for example, FB: Meta can infer many details about me without me ever posting anything, such as figuring out my home town based on relatives and school friends -- many other examples.
And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.
What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.
Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.
Only if you think forums, 4chan or whatnot from ye olden days are also "social media". HN has no friends feature, no curated algorithm, no way to discover creators...
HN only violates your privacy if you write your personal details into comments. Facebook violates your privacy in ways that only talented engineers can understand.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that consumerism is a stronger force than that care. Which makes sense, consumerism is the backbone of every consumer-focused capitalist economy.
Our greatest power is literally not buying things. But people don’t do it in practice. Why is complicated. We are constantly bombarded by propaganda to push us to consumerist behavior. We just don’t call it that, it’s “advertisement”.
Many people refuse to have any of these devices in their home over privacy concerns, one person I know wants them unplugged when visiting. I like the convenience, but there is a line and Amazon is crossing it. The lack of innovation, layoffs, and reports of financial losses were the warning the enshittifcation of Alexa is coming and I expect this is only the start.
Alexa and Google Assistant created the market, now it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Home Assistant is working well in testing and has a great feature set for home automation, the LLM support is fun, and most of the smart devices I've bought over the years are compatible including Apple Homekit. At least for people that do care, there are options.
Cynically, much of the "privacy" industry is just a red herring by big tech / data broker industry to normalize how egregious their privacy violations are.
"You know that boundary that we agreed upon a while back? We're gonna violate that boundary now. This is not an opportunity to negotiate a new agreement, we're gonna do whatever we want to you because we're big and you're little."
Stuff like this is why I've cut amazon out of my life entirely. No more new devices, no more new purchases, cancelled prime, all of it gone.
If you bought something under the pretense that you could disable cloud stuff and then it silently starts uploading to the cloud, that's a violation of your agreement.
If they start dropping all requests until you assent to their shrinkwrap agreement, that still feels like a violation of the promises they made when you bought it, but unfortunately has precedent. See also: all the video games that no longer work because the publishers stopped supporting the servers they relied on.
The agreement contains provisions by which they can unilaterally change the agreement. They almost all do now, it's pretty standard boilerplate. Not long ago there was a TV, I wanna say it was LG but doublecheck that before you quote me, that shipped an OTA update with a change to the licensing agreement. Either you agreed, or they intentionally disabled all functionality. As we steadily move toward that sort of freedom that means less things you can actually do and more ways you can get screwed over this kind of stuff becomes increasingly common.
"Legal" requires judges that will view the case in a certain way and often needs the force of a government agency to back it. This administration has gutted both those things. Expect it to get worse, not better.
Amazon is rarely the cheapest way to have a package delivered to your home in less than two days. You can often find people much cheaper if you don’t mind waiting a week or two.
I reduced Amazon by 90% when I realized how much money I was wasting over 70-120 packages a year.
> Amazon is rarely the cheapest way to have a package delivered to your home in less than two days. You can often find people much cheaper if you don’t mind waiting a week or two.
But "waiting a week or two" seems directly at odds with delivered in less than 2 days. End users don't really care about shipping speed per service (unless it's a perishable or temperature-sensitive item). They care about how long it will take to arrive from the time the order is placed.
Thinking about that picture from a (UK?) hospital breakroom with the sign that said "Please turn off the Echo before discussing sensitive patient information."
I will never have anything voice controlled in my house if I can help it. I mean I have them but they're all turned off. Except for the teenager's iphone, but we troll him by saying stuff like "Hey Siri, how do I stop being annoying?" or something like that.
I am fully in favor of team "I'm never sending my voice anywhere", but assuming a locally-hosted voice control I'll say: voice is a great interface around the house.
If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.
I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.
Now would be a good time to have a functional FTC commissioner. Doing a bait and switch like on a product that was sold with a set of features should be illegal. If I buy a car and the sales guy stops by my house the next day to take back the wheels, it would rightfully be seen as ridiculous.
I’m afraid the only thing we can do at this point is gun for an economic depression, ride out three years of that just like with Hoover (1929–33), and upgrade to New Deal 2.0 beta. There’s no amount of protests that can convince the median Trump voter that anything is wrong in America unless it affects him personally. And no amount of protest will convince Trump that he has made a single mistake in his entire life.
I feel the issue is deeper than that.
We no longer buy products, we rent them, it's hard for consumer protection laws to catch up with that (even European).
And yet this is what Tesla did. They sold a car and added a surcharge for full self-driving as a future option, or they added it as an upgrade option. But they never delivered. That's like buying a car with the promise of wheels but the wheels are never delivered (except you actually need the wheels etc).
I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.
ToS have limits, people in a practical sense aren't really able to read and understand the ToS of every product they buy, which means a ToS can only go so far in the ways it allows companies to be predatory against consumers.
I always wonder how valid these actually are. There's probably a reasonable range.
Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.
The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.
Perhaps there should be license allowing the procurement and operation of consumer devices having overly complex (including language) ToC, making sure that the user knows what it takes to have and to operate a device like that. With categories for the various device categories, just like for vechicles (although cars and trafic rules are much simpler than ToCs, still that is a simple analogy to build up the complexity of ToCs).
It was not yours to begin with. Think of it as a service. Just give it back and go to a competitor. Ohh wait, there are no competitors! Monopolies suck! Especially if they are world-wide.
This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference. It's ok for people to feel things, and it's ok for people to want laws addressing anti-consumer behavior.
The car is no longer usable without the wheels, I believe the argument for Alexa would be that the core functionality is still usable without the privacy setting.
I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.
"Do not send voice recordings" back to Amazon HQ =/= "privacy focused." It's arguably a necessary feature for minimal privacy in one's home, and I expect that a lot of people bought those devices with that in mind.
If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.
If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?
I will never understand why anyone would ever want to use voice assistants (other than for accessibility reasons). It is so gimmicky and awkward to use.
Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".
This reads more like, 'they're not very good' rather than 'people don't want them'. They could be hugely useful, and even in their current capacity I find are very much so.
I find it maddening that my google home, hasn't got a single bit better in the 8 years since it's release, and it's now missing some of my favourite features it had at launch. The whole market has been stagnate ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game.
Yeah, I feel the same way. For a small set of features that work fairly reliably it is great. Almost all of my use is:
1. Set $thing timer for $time
2. Add $thing to my grocery list.
3. Weather
4. Convert $amount to $unit.
And it is pretty great when these work, being able to do it in the kitchen without stopping whatever I am doing (example setting the dishwasher timer while putting in the soap, adding milk to the grocery list as I am pulling the last bag out of the fridge) is amazing. No wasted time and no risk of forgetting to pick up my phone and do it after I finish the current task.
But even then it is pretty unreliable. I feel like it has been getting worse over time to be honest.
> ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game
It was. You’re one of the few in the thread to realize that, while others are frothing at the mouth over Democrats vs Republicans or EU vs US. The Echo and like devices were never about you but about putting surveillance gear in your house and getting you to pay for it. At least on old rotary phones the cradle switch or plungers physically broke the circuit that powered the microphones. The modern cell phone and home assistant and security cameras smart televisions and smart vehicles are surveilling you at all times.
Driving, working (mute, tell it to do something, unmute -> you've done something without getting up on camera), dirty hands, too comfy to get up and switch the lights off, etc.
It's also probably great for old people. I keep checking for language support since I can definitely imagine an older person being able to learn voice prompts where they're often absolutely lost on a phone. It'd also let them call someone if they've fallen somewhere around the house and can't get up.
The point is to raise a generation on them, and then they'll look at us weird for not wanting to send data back to the Amazon mothership so we can write down milk on the grocery list, a task that would be impossible without phoning Amazon.
Making an urgent phone call to your spouse while rushing to your kids in the ER without taking your hands off the steering while is a fucking godsend. No matter how broken they are currently, they do have their place, and they work at least a bare minimum.
You should just drive and call later. You are putting yourself, your kids and the people around you at risk by calling someone else while driving, even when keeping your hands no the steering wheel.
It's handy for non-tech-savy people, namely the elderly. It can be used for playing music: "Alexa play X", "Alexa shutdown" is all the user needs to know.
As I pointed in another comment: because they let you keep uninterrupted focus in what you're doing.
If I'm coding and realize I didn't turn on the heating in the living room I have three choices: I can break my flow and walk there and back, I can be cold during dinner, or I can yell "turn on the heating in the living room" and have it out of my mind.
If it sounds like a luxury that's because it is. But like all luxuries it crept up on me and I only noticed once it was gone.
You can preprogram super cheap chips to do voice commands. They come with limitations but they don't wire tap your home to sell private conversation data to advertising companies to later water board your kids into purchasing thing's on social media
It's probably a mix. The computational power to run a dialog system is one thing but it's also just more convenient in terms of maintainance to have the system be completely server side.
Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!
Readit News
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.
They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...
Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"
Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?
For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D
As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!
If you don't have full control over your data, someone else does - and will do as they please with it, eventually.
Does Home Assistant also have these features?
Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.
There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.
OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].
[0] https://github.com/music-assistant/voice-support
This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...
They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.
"I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization."
The comment further talks about the mute button on the original Amazon Echo (i.e. Alexa voice assistant) being hardware-based : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208670
I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?
But can you safely do this with multi room devices?
As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.
I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..
In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.
Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)
As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.
And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.
But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.
When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.
I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.
I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.
Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.
What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.
There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.
The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.
... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).
People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.)
This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism, often becoming nihilistic. But the practical truth is that people don't care about philosophy or politics. Human society's default is authoritarianism. Rather than be upset at this impulse, it would be wiser to acknowledge with amazement that we managed to try something different. Civilization will struggle with it's default settings for as long as civilization exists, and our role is fight against them, knowing the fight is never over.
I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.
This is a very interesting question -- Thomas Hobbes would disagree with you here.
Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.
I do not think so
I think freedom
Some people have enjoyed the benefits of government agencies that promote consumer protections. At some level, maybe we hear about or even directly benefitted from some consumer protection agency, and assume the government has our back. Maybe it is naive, but I still think that assumption is there: we don't have to care because it is someone else's job to care about privacy. How could it be put on sale if it is not safe? They test cars, for safety, they test food for safety, etc. They must test these things, too, right?
This is clearly not the case, though. The government works for big tech. The US government is even shutting down consumer protection agencies at the behest of big tech and leaving us to their whims!
By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.
"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.
Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.
Complaining is easy.
Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.
More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.
For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.
There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.
Dead Comment
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy
Yea, so, looks like they do care.
> they never would have purchased this product in the first place
They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.
> Social Media,
I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.
> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate
Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.
> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.
Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.
If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).
As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).
"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.
And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).
Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.
[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/
[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/
Your second sentences proves that the first is a lie. People very clearly care about their privacy. These surveillance systems are designed so that users never see the line between the collection of their private data and the consequences. People are upset when they know that their privacy has been violated, but Amazon tells them that they are safe and they never see the contractor working for Amazon listening to them having sex so they don't have the sense of outrage that they should.
Amazon is exploiting well known and researched limitations of human's brain/perception and they've crafted their marketing to be as manipulative and reassuring as possible to keep people bugging their own homes with their devices. It's a little unfair to blame the public being fleeced and not the multi-billion dollar corporation who has devoted unimaginable resources into manipulating the customers they are screwing over. You and I know better than to fall for their bullshit, but it's easy to see how most will struggle.
Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)
Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?
We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?
Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.
Majority user care about privacy the same way they care about the environment with apples greenwashing. One marketing line is sufficient.
They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.
My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.
Regular folks are even less aware and are scared by technology - when a scary popup comes up, they will press anything and agree to anything just to make it go away.
A big reason for this is that no one really explains what happens and why people should care.
Typically, it's either a hand-wave to "this should be important, you should care", or steeped in so much technical detail that the non-technical listener has a hard time wrapping their head around it. (The third way it's explained is via a bunch of conspiracy theory/NSA stuff, which probably just turns most people off entirely).
Worse, people have been in a dozen breaches in the last few years, but the majority haven't suffered a personal impact (yet). Further reinforcing "why should I care?".
And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.
What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.
Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.
How do you square that with people not caring about privacy? The feature as it existed was there specifically to address privacy concerns.
Our greatest power is literally not buying things. But people don’t do it in practice. Why is complicated. We are constantly bombarded by propaganda to push us to consumerist behavior. We just don’t call it that, it’s “advertisement”.
Alexa and Google Assistant created the market, now it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Home Assistant is working well in testing and has a great feature set for home automation, the LLM support is fun, and most of the smart devices I've bought over the years are compatible including Apple Homekit. At least for people that do care, there are options.
Stuff like this is why I've cut amazon out of my life entirely. No more new devices, no more new purchases, cancelled prime, all of it gone.
If you bought something under the pretense that you could disable cloud stuff and then it silently starts uploading to the cloud, that's a violation of your agreement.
If they start dropping all requests until you assent to their shrinkwrap agreement, that still feels like a violation of the promises they made when you bought it, but unfortunately has precedent. See also: all the video games that no longer work because the publishers stopped supporting the servers they relied on.
They should be forced to offer a refund.
I reduced Amazon by 90% when I realized how much money I was wasting over 70-120 packages a year.
But "waiting a week or two" seems directly at odds with delivered in less than 2 days. End users don't really care about shipping speed per service (unless it's a perishable or temperature-sensitive item). They care about how long it will take to arrive from the time the order is placed.
That was an interesting feature to discover.
If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.
I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.
How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?
Dead Comment
I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.
This is about removing a privacy feature.
Dead Comment
Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?
And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.
Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.
The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.
Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.
Dead Comment
I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.
If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.
If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?
Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".
I find it maddening that my google home, hasn't got a single bit better in the 8 years since it's release, and it's now missing some of my favourite features it had at launch. The whole market has been stagnate ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game.
1. Set $thing timer for $time
2. Add $thing to my grocery list.
3. Weather
4. Convert $amount to $unit.
And it is pretty great when these work, being able to do it in the kitchen without stopping whatever I am doing (example setting the dishwasher timer while putting in the soap, adding milk to the grocery list as I am pulling the last bag out of the fridge) is amazing. No wasted time and no risk of forgetting to pick up my phone and do it after I finish the current task.
But even then it is pretty unreliable. I feel like it has been getting worse over time to be honest.
It was. You’re one of the few in the thread to realize that, while others are frothing at the mouth over Democrats vs Republicans or EU vs US. The Echo and like devices were never about you but about putting surveillance gear in your house and getting you to pay for it. At least on old rotary phones the cradle switch or plungers physically broke the circuit that powered the microphones. The modern cell phone and home assistant and security cameras smart televisions and smart vehicles are surveilling you at all times.
Driving, working (mute, tell it to do something, unmute -> you've done something without getting up on camera), dirty hands, too comfy to get up and switch the lights off, etc.
It's also probably great for old people. I keep checking for language support since I can definitely imagine an older person being able to learn voice prompts where they're often absolutely lost on a phone. It'd also let them call someone if they've fallen somewhere around the house and can't get up.
When I'm driving and want to switch ANC mode, it's convenient as well.
If I'm coding and realize I didn't turn on the heating in the living room I have three choices: I can break my flow and walk there and back, I can be cold during dinner, or I can yell "turn on the heating in the living room" and have it out of my mind.
If it sounds like a luxury that's because it is. But like all luxuries it crept up on me and I only noticed once it was gone.
Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!
There is a setting to disable having your voice saved along with options to automatically delete it after a number of months.