What the hell? Alexa just came on unprompted and started playing my "sleep music routine" in my son's room

Rojo: journalist / athlete / intellectual / victim

Dude throw that sh!t away. I'd never put one of those surveilance devices in my house, much less in my childs room.

That's weird. A gust of wind just blew my front door open! Woah!

they are spying on you. those devices provide very little convenience but they listen to EVERYTHING that you say regardless of whether you are talking to alexa or not. it's horrifying and should be illegal.

This is true rojo. Why would you ever have alexa in your home?

You have been algorithmed. Your child needs a sleep routine whether you, as a parent, thinks he needs one or not.

I'm getting a chip implanted in my head. Too many devices and cards in my wallet 🤪

So does your phone....

rojo, could you have accidentally said 'yes' to an prompt that asked if you wanted to enable it? in any case there's a 'routines' section in the app that should help you disable it.

they don't, not in any meaningful way. there's a little loop running on the device that keeps a few seconds of audio at a time, enough to figure out if you just said 'alexa', and does nothing else with that audio. i don't even think it's saved to disk.

if they actually sent everything you said to Amazon, it would be trivial to prove that just by analyzing network traffic. so you should have high confidence they aren't sending out all audio they hear. and most of the devices aren't even powerful enough to do a lot locally, which is why the original alexa architecture (and how it should mostly still work today) relied on remote servers in Amazon datacenters to do the heavy lifting. if your hypothesis is that they are reducing audio to text locally and uploading it as text... also no.

at least you can get a rootable phone and have full control of it. That fight was won by the consumers.

Spooky! You probably just inadvertently set it to do this, I can't see disturbing people's sleep being a selling feature of these things. If you didn't maybe it is just glitching or it's some new promotional thing that you have to opt out of?

At least 12 Letsrun readers watch South park

Sounds like the start of a cheesy horror movie.

Nice try, Bezos. You reptile.

f*ck this is brilliant

Just wait until you connect to the Bluetooth in your rental car in Spain and the music starts playing in your Alexa back home in the US.

-Posted from my iPhone.

Shoot your Alexa then - it’s Baltimore, you can get a gun eadily