Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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forced to buy an echo for new house. any suggestions? (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

my family is moving into a much bigger house than we used to have. we use amazon echos as an intercom system through the announcement feature. because our house is bigger, i’m being forced to get one myself for my room. i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this and are forcing me to get one. what can i do to limit its tracking?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Get one with a hardware switch to mute the mic.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

The microphone disable switch on every google home/amazon alexa device does not physically disable the microphone; it just informs the software that you'd like it to not listen to you. It can still do so whenever it pleases.

This is how/why it is able to respond 'your microphone is currently disabled' when you try to command it with that switch on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I had thought teardowns proved this wrong and that some of the devices were hardware and/or a separate chip/software stack?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Pretty sure that the very first gen Google ?dot? Mini speaker has physical disconnect.