JackbyDev
Professional developer and amateur gardener located near Atlanta, GA in the USA.
- 0 Posts
- 53 Comments
I just see thread titles, I don’t really check the community. It meets OP’s criteria. Also, not everyone is interested in the same level of privacy. I’m never going to go through the Herculean task of degoogling myself, too much stuff uses my Gmail. It’s just not worth it. I only have so much time in the day to enjoy myself. Aggressively turning things off like personalized ads, sharing data, etc. is acceptable to me.
The police told the suspect, Jorge Molina, they had data tracking his phone to the site where a man was shot nine months earlier. They had made the discovery after obtaining a search warrant that required Google to provide information on all devices it recorded near the killing, potentially capturing the whereabouts of anyone in the area.
I hate Google as much as everyone here, but we shouldn’t equate complying with a warrant to “give it to the cops when asked.” They were required to give it.
Sports betting is an interesting one. It’s a growing industry in the US. While things like Amazon are sort of nebulously evil, I think more people can agree betting is dangerous. I was unemployed from about July 2023 to Feb 2024. I turned down a sports betting job early on because I didn’t wanna do it for moral reasons but months later I pursued a different one because I was more desperate for a job. Luckily they turned me down and I found a different job. That sucks, but at least I don’t have to feel like I’m doing something wrong.
Imagine posting a rule that says “do not walk on the grass” among other rules and then banning anyone who steps on the grass with the thought process that if they didn’t obey that rule they were likely disobeying other rules. Except the grass is somewhere that no one would see unless they actually read the rules. The rules were the only place that mentioned that grass.
Honestly, just muting the microphone is mostly fine. I really don’t believe they transmit shit to the cloud when they’re muted. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they answer when they’re muted so they’re still listening, but they process the “Alexa” (or whatever wake word you use) locally and then send a short buffer of recording along with everything you say following it to the cloud to process. It’s likely they just hear that you said the wake word locally and then say “Hey I’m muted” without sending it to the cloud.
I know this answer isn’t the most privacy oriented on a privacy community, but I think this option is more reasonable than you’d think.
You mentioned blocking with DNS. You could try setting up Wireshark or something and see if there are any packets from it when you say the wake word while it is muted and how it compares to when you say the wake word when it’s unmuted.
Unfortunately the red LED would always be on because it’s muted, but you could cover it with opaque tape. Like electric tape.
If you just need one for that, the cheapest Echo Dot model. If you care about a nice Bluetooth speaker aspect then get an Echo. If you wanted a screen for whatever reason then an Echo Show. But Echo Dot is the cheapest model. Oldest version you can get is fine.
Leaving the microphone muted should prevent packets from going to the cloud but I can’t find definitive information either way. They process the wake word locally so answering to say “the device is muted” (if they do, mine don’t, but I’ve heard some do) doesn’t necessarily imply it’s sending anything to the cloud.
Any excess profits not reinvested are paid as dividends to share holders. However, if you’re reinvesting that money from dividends into buying more shares then there’s no difference between the two. Think of it like this. If I’m a company and I have a dollar, I can either invest it in the company and make my value go up by a dollar or give my share holders a dollar. Of course, in the inverse situation, the share.holder can just sell a dollar worth of stock and the situation is the same.
So there really isn’t too much of a difference between the two.
A practical approach would be looking at CVEs for both, but more CVEs doesn’t necessarily mean something was more insecure before.