Do you or would you have and Amazon Echo? I need advice please.

[letsjog]

We have been ever so kindly gifted one recently. It's the tall Echo one so a lovely speaker.

I have and I'm a frequent user of Amazon prime and the Fire TV stick. I saw one working at said friends house and they use it mainly to ask it to play music as the speaker is really nice and she mentioned she will probably use it for phone calls whilst she's cooking/busy with other things and they will set it up so it works with the tv too.

DP told me I'm more than welcome to but he won't use it. He's very wary of things like that and using his card for online purchases and so on in general.

I'm in two minds as I probably don't know enough about it.
I can see there's a button so you can choose to switch the voice activation/speaker off when you don't want to use it. I also saw that once you have the app on your phone you can opt out of Amazon using the voice recordings for research and in order to improve the devices understanding.

I don't know if I'm being paranoid about it for a good reason or due to DP. My FIL also saw it and went "oh oh oh! You don't want one of these in your home!"
But AIBU that a part of me thinks it's not that terrible? Everything runs on Google/Windows/Amazon in general. Phones/iPads etc often pop up with adverts for things you haven't even googled yet but barely mentioned out loud in passing to someone.

Would having an Alexa/Amazon Echo be such a terrible thing?

Does anyone have it or anyone against it?

Any insight or views would be very much appreciated.

Doesn't bother me if the government's listening to me on my echo anyway to be quite honest. Does it really matter?

I have one, it's very useful for dealing with a rebellious toddler. No matter how adament DS is that he isn't going to bed, if Alexa says it's bedtime he runs straight through and gets into bed

Honestly op, you need to tell the men in your life to get a grip. What rhe fuck do they think it would be listening into . Do you want beans with your tea? Let's watch bake off?

I've four.

Certain demographics have historically been scared of technology advances. Remember how mobile phones would give us all cancer? As would microwaves? And I'm sure there was something on computers too.

Unless you're James Bond, you've nothing to worry about. 🤣

I've got two. I'm not at all worried about anyone listening in. They really wouldn't hear anything interesting.

Love mine.

It plays music to me
It plays radio stations
It adds to my calendar and gives me reminders
It make me a to do list and a shopping list
It answers general knowledge questions
It has instructions on how to do things from Wiki How
It tells me the weather forecast
It tells me about my morning commute conditions
I can set alarms and reminders when I'm cooking
It reads audible books and kindle books

It tells me 'sweet dreams' when I tell her goodnight

I bought my eldest one and he uses it for music, alarm clock and sports results, however his brother who is 8 constantly goes in his bedroom asking Alexa questions, and has found it extremely useful in helping him with his homework.

@chellochello haha after reading your farting comment we just asked her to do it and she of course obliged lol!😂

It's really not about whether you think you are "interesting" or not. Would you want your conversations displayed on the side of a bus, or played on the radio?

No way I'd get one and have everything at my house recorded and sent over internet. But then again I work in IT and am familiar with the general level of competence/data safety of the industry and how potentially exploitable things are. "Paranoia" seems to be quite common among my colleagues too.

Personally I'd be less worried about government breaking down your door and more about being vulnerable to very targeted marketing, ending up in an information bubble and costs if we ever switch to a private USA style healthcare.

We have 3. My 6 year old dd loves adding songs to her playlist and her one has her alarm for half 6, my room’s alarm goes off at 6:15 and the kitchen one goes off at 8:05 so she knows to go get shoes on for school. She also uses it as a timer for brushing teeth. Her wee brother likes it when she plays his favourite songs for him too.

Why are people going on about being recorded all the time? They don't record all the time. Alexa starts recording after the "wake" word (which is Alexa) so it records everything you say to it after that, and stop recording after its followed your instruction.
Occasionally it will misshear and "wake up" when it shouldn't but it's really not often.

You can log onto your Amazon account and actually listen to the entire archive of recordings which have been saves from your Alexa devices. So you can hear what they've recorded. You can also delete them all from the Amazon server/cloud.

Or, at the end of each day just say "Alexa, delete everything I said today" and the recordings are deleted.

Alexa is listening all the time, otherwise how would it know you said Alexa?

I work in AI. I won’t have a voice assistant in my home. Many of the people working in the same area as me won’t use them either.

It’s not government surveillance you need to worry about, though; it’s corporate ownership of data. And it’s the aggregation of that data that’s particularly problematic.

We have 4.
We love them.
Mind you I'm not a paranoid person.

I wouldn't. It's a whole other level of invasion of privacy I just don't need or want.

@RedTitsMcGinty I'm sorry I'm really daft with stuff like this. Could you expand on that a bit more?