[john-h-k]

Presumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR.

I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

[fidotron]

> I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

You mean the media stopped talking about it - it has no relation to whether it happens or not.

[brookst]

I just want to hear about this audio codec that’s so efficient that nobody has seen a single bit being sent.

[tehwebguy]

Amazon literally invented the class of products that sit in your house and listen to you

[john-h-k]

Yeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage

[pluralmonad]

But tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.

[john-h-k]

If a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage

[gruez]

Seems like a stretch to equivocate hearing aid telemetry with smartphones or TVs secretly eavesdropping?

[torginus]

How would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.'

Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.