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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Lunduke's video on this latest issue
Date: 17 Oct 2024 18:37:23 GMT
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On Thu, 17 Oct 2024 09:02:53 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

> I am aware, except that I don't believe it protects you if you willingly
> install all sorts of technology which has already been reported to be
> used by corporations and the government to monitor your life. For
> example, we know that Amazon's Alexa listens in on your household
> conversations. It could be to sell you a product, but it could also be
> to obtain evidence to use against you in a lawsuit.

That proved to be a problem. Amazon's brilliant idea was Alexa would be 
used to buy stuff so the hardware was sold at cost or below. They didn't 
foresee people would use Alexa to play music or turn the lights off, not 
purchase items. 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-
failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

That's a two year old article. Here's the update.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-timeline-cost-
amazon-25-billion-in-4-years/

Amazon's predicament is even worse than losing money on the devices. The 
device responds to the wake word, 'alexa' or whatever. You can change it. 
A woman I know by the name of Alex had to, obviously. Anyway after waking 
up the speech processing is done on Amazon servers, so there is the 
continuing expense of keeping the servers running. Now they have the 
quandary of telling happy Alexa users they will stop working, which is a 
legally fraught move, or try to talk them into a subscription which won't 
fly either.

Pardon my Schadenfreude at Amazon screwing themselves. Other products 
worked out a lot better. The ads on my ad supported Kindles seldom result 
in a purchase but I do by a lot of books on kindle. The same for the Fire 
TV. I only subscribe to Netflix in addition to the Amazon Prime service 
but I assume they get a cut from Netflix.