this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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[–] Viking_Hippie 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa

If you're high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you're also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.

So no, we will not be taking your word for it.

[–] EatYouWell 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They'd also be violating their NDA.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

NDAs are null and void for illegal activity

[–] EatYouWell 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Illegal activity was never being discussed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Depends on if you think essentially wiretapping someone's house is illegal

[–] EatYouWell 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The discussion was about Amazon not doing that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I know? I wasn't disagreeing with you

[–] EnderMB 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't make any sense. If I were "higher up", do you think I would be actually doing any IC work? I'd be in management, and probably won't even know where to look at any of the fucking source code.

Feel free not to take my word for it, but also feel free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.

Is Lemmy just full of conspiracy nuts or something?

[–] Viking_Hippie 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If I were "higher up", do you think I would be actually doing any IC work

If you weren't, why would you have access to enough data to know for sure whatv every part of it does and doesn't do?

free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.

So basically biased people and people who might lose their jobs if they say anything Amazon doesn't want people to know? Sure, sounds credible!

There's conspiracy theories and then there's expecting that a company that has been proven to spy on people without their knowledge will spy on people without their knowledge.

[–] EnderMB 30 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That's not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device "listening".

I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it's corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.

IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I've never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn't phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don't leave the device, they're an offline trigger to get the "actual" content.

I'll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven't experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don't do basic research before making statements?

[–] squidman64 19 points 11 months ago

lol they are such stereotypical conspiracy theorists too, “of course you’d say it’s not true, that’s exactly what someone who was hiding the truth would say!”

[–] Zangoose 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Tell me you're not a software developer without telling me you're not a software developer.

If you're working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn't be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings

(italicized is edited in for clarity)

Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.

(Obligatory disclaimer that I'm pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

So your theory as to why you haven’t seen evidence is that there’s a conspiracy of people withholding the evidence. I gotta ask, do you have evidence of that conspiracy?