Echo dot/radiation exposure for kids

[Stormy900]

AIBU to be worried about this?
10 year old and 12 year d DC would both love one for Christmas, for their bedrooms.
They want it for music, asking questions, audible stories, etc.
If they were radiation free I'd get them without hesitation.
But I'm honestly genuinely worried about increasing their exposure to radiation when using these on top of already being exposed to high levels from our Internet WiFi.
I read online that an echo dot should be used several meters away from the child at all times to minimise risks from radiation exposure, but the distance given on the echo dot small print safety info is bigger than the size of our house, let along the size of their rooms!
Yet everyone I know seems to have one and noone seems to care about the radiation.
So AIBU???
Any experts on this out there?

I wouldn't worry about it, OP.

As a PP said, radio frequency radiation is non-ionising.

You'd be surprised how many radio waves penetrate the walls into your home across all the bands.

I've worked with radio transmitters for years and have never heard of them being harmful.

Agree

Echo dot is an anagram of

Code hot

Make of that what you like OP, but to me it's screaming danger....

🙄

How have you soothed OPs fears?

Thank you for this reply.
This is the type of reply I was hoping for.
It's not actually boring at all, I find it really interesting and want to learn more about everything you've discussed.
Re your suggestion to go tech free, I can't in this day and age, and that's the problem. The world runs on tech now. I'd be signing out of modern life if I went tech free.

My DH is in radiation protection, and there is no ionising radiation risk from the Echo dot itself. There is radiation from wifi all around them all the time, no matter where they are, but it is very very small.

This.

Put your brain in gear - try to think logically, especially wrt Internet scare stories.

The dot has to talk to your router, as does every other WiFi device in the house. Talk means bi-directional - the router has to emit higher signal levels than your dot to reach through the house.

If the dot was supposed to be kept more than 8" from your sleeping toddler - how do you cut out the transmission from your router? - it'll be blanketing your toddler as well as reaching the dot. If the toddler is sleeping between the dot and the router - heaven forbid! they'll be getting zapped from two directions.

If you get a WiFi scanner for your mobile (eg https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=abdelrahman.wifianalyzerpro) you'll probably find a half dozen other routers visible - you'll also see the relative signal strengths.

Many light switches and plug sockets will emit a burst of rf every time they are switched because any 'spark' emits across much of the electromagnetic spectrum - from rf to infra-red - the first radio transmitters were spark transmitters!

(Your children are much more at cancer & copd risk from microplastics - still a low though unquantified risk - but look at your carpet and clothes labels for plastic content then think what happens when you hoover your carpets, wash clothes etc.

Even more damaging to your children will be the ramifications of climate change.)

They're not getting "zapped"! You're talking about a tiny exposure to an RF signal from one device, compared to a slightly less tiny exposure from another device. As I said previously, the only effect on the body is heating, and these levels are way too low to produce a heating effect.

OP you are correct to be concerned and I hope you can ignore the many ignorant and frankly nasty comments on here. This is not the place to come for information on this topic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that radiofrequency electromagnetic fields can "possibly" be carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B). Wireless phone use has been linked to an increased risk of brain cancer. The French National Agency Health Safety of Food, Environment and Labour (ANSES) has also recommended to limit exposure of the population to radiofrequencies – especially from mobile phones – and especially for children and heavy users.

I have no idea whether the device you talk about can work on Ethernet (wired access to internet) but if yes, this is something you could consider. You'd have to get your house wired for Ethernet if it is not already. Recently we wired our house for Ethernet and we no longer have wifi in the house. Result: we sleep better and I no longer get headaches, at all. If Ethernet is not practical then at least turn the wifi off at night. Plenty of parents and adults I know do this.

It is incorrect to claim that the only effect on the body of RF radiation is heating, by the way. What is true is that this was the only effect that was considered in the ridiculous "safety tests" done by the industry to get rollout of RF devices approved by regulators. And to test for safety of this heating effect, industry exposed a glass head full of water to RF radiation for a few minutes! Go figure.

Except "possibly carcinogenic", group 2B, is a very loose category. also in there: aloe Vera, ferns and pickled vegetables.

Group 2A - probably carcinogenic and therefore higher risk - includes red meat and outdoor air pollution. Which would mean a veggie diet and masking outdoors.

Oh and wrt these devices listening to you - yes they do - in order to pick up the trigger word - but at any point they won't have more than a sentence or two - it just gets overwritten if there is no trigger.

Thinking logically again - if every dot in the world was recording everything heard - how much storage would be needed and how much processing power to access/analyse this lot - for what benefit?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022701/worldwide-amazon-echo-unit-shipment/ suggests there have been something like 300 million echo devices sold to date.

Assuming these only pick up an average of 4hrs a day at low quality - say 2kbit/s - then you're talking about 8million GB/day 240 million GB pcm (https://savvycalculator.com/call-recording-storage-calculator/) not impossible, but what possible benefit would be worth the cost - quite apart from it's illegality under GDPR and it's international equivalents.

I might muse that security services could enable wider recording as they are alleged to be able to do on mobiles (actually they can't on uncompromised devices) but what kind of dumb terrorist/crook would conduct business in the room with a microphone!

OP, that 'EMF Academy' link is total bollocks. That site is aimed at paranoid conspiracy theorists and gullible idiots and it exists solely to flog them shonky equipment that does nothing.

You and your child are not any risk whatsoever from radiation exposure from an Echo Dot or any household items. This isn't even up for debate. It's just fact. You don't need to worry.

I was listening to a leading health professional saying on the radio that in the future we’ll find out that screens and wifi are the cigarettes of the 70s and 80s, that we’re killing brain cells and disturbing the natural growth of our cells which is also causing more cancers and I totally believe this too and so we try to curb them as much as possible (more because we have teens with ridiculously addictive personalities and screens have fecked their concentration and affected their personalities and with ds15 his eyes) but I wouldn’t think an echo dot would be the biggest evil they could get!!

>They're not getting "zapped"!
Couldn't agree more - just that if someone thought that moving toddler further away from the gadget would limit their risk of being "zapped" they weren't thinking logically!

(oh and for the 'ethernet' promoters of course there is an rf field around power cables and even cat5 cable - no shielding is perfect so make sure the cat5 is encased in a high conductivity conduit.....)

Worrying about rf exposure from home devices (apart from damaged microwaves) is about as batshit as it gets.

not getting them for that reason is ridiculous. But do you really want something in their rooms that is always listening and feeding their data onward to god knows who? I’d never have any of those smart speakers in my house, it’s incredibly invasive.

Bloody hell how much screen time did you allow for all this issues?

Gratifyingly it's not a choice between wifi and tech-free. We are heavily tech oriented but run everything off the Ethernet, including our solar panel inverter data-sending device.

@ThatsMsAtomicBob "Possibly" carcinogenic is a common category, I agree, due to the lack of research on items in that category. However when it comes to RF radiation, the American Cancer Society defines the risk well: "the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified RF radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence of a possible increase in risk for brain tumors among cell phone users, and inadequate evidence for other types of cancer." "Limited evidence" means some evidence: "A positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent, mixture or exposure circumstance and cancer for which a causal interpretation is considered by the Working Group to be credible, but chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence."

I have lived long enough to see many items once placed in the "possible" carcinogen category be upgraded to "probable" and "sufficient" evidence of carcinogenicity. No one wants to be part of the statistics that justify that progression.

Here's a good study by the US National Toxicology Program: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/topics/cellphones
"The NTP studies found that high exposure to RFR (900 MHz) used by cell phones was associated with:
Clear evidence of an association with tumors in the hearts of male rats. The tumors were malignant schwannomas.
Some evidence of an association with tumors in the brains of male rats. The tumors were malignant gliomas.
Some evidence of an association with tumors in the adrenal glands of male rats. The tumors were benign, malignant, or complex combined pheochromocytoma."

Of course cancer isn't the only thing that those who restrict wifi exposure are concerned about. Plenty of people get migraines, brain fog, pain conditions and other problems when over-exposed to wifi. These endpoints are very under-researched.

Bloody hell how much screen time did you allow for all this issues?
behindyouiam
happensd over Covid unfortunately but yes our fault, I was working, dh was wfh, ds would go on his phone, the other three on phone, tablet and pc, dh spent the whole time trying to get them off and getting them to play outside but easy to say when eg you’re supposed to be in meetings

My ex father in law would have found that article and latched on to it and never let go. He never allowed a microwave because it'll cook you too. He never allowed mobile phones because he knew someone who ended up with brain cancer because if them. The man was a total hypocrite though, at his work he used both. And he died this year after contracting hepatitis from food at a funeral.
Looking back, I think he would have been an avid conspiracy theorist.

How have you verified that your information is factual? It sounds like a load of bull

I did a lot of work in the days of planning for 3g and 4g rollout - I looked at the rat study - the radiation levels were way higher than could possibly be met in real life, rat skulls are much thinner than human skulls and the results were not statistically significant - hence the "possible" reports.

There have been many subsequent large scale studies showing either no effects or inconclusive results. The US nih has a good summary of results here:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/cell-phones-fact-sheet

If you walk down any city street in the UK with an RF monitor you'll find you are continually bathed in RF - either stop worrying or wear tinfoil hats - your choice.

Interesting reading.
Some very opposite viewes here.