Alexa is listening (and recording)
- Thread starter kev54
- Start date
But in the news yesterday WHSmith are pulling out of the high street and very few people these days buy newspapers also many books are ready digitally. How much energy was used printing newspapers and books distributing them etc. A lot of data centre's are in countries like Iceland with unlimited green geothermal electricity. It would be interesting to see how it balances out but I think the national grid uses less electricity now than in the past even with EVs etc. I think the green argument against data is probably a red herring.
In some ways, this is amusing. Alexas always used to send all the data to Amazon for processing. But Amazon (and Google) both realised that they weren't making money from them, and it was costing them a fortune in server costs to process all the voice prompts. The business was a massive loss. So a few years ago, they started moving a lot of the processing on your home device. You may have noticed that the quality of the recognition got considerably worse as there's not much processing power in a little Echo Dot. But this did mean that Amazon didn't have as much of your data.
Now the AI bubble has come along and they want as much training data as possible, and to learn as much about you as they can. So they've forcefully moved everything to pretty much how it was, where all data gets sent back to their servers. The additional clauses say they can use your requests to train their systems... but they could probably have done that anyway with the existing user licence agreement.
Now the AI bubble has come along and they want as much training data as possible, and to learn as much about you as they can. So they've forcefully moved everything to pretty much how it was, where all data gets sent back to their servers. The additional clauses say they can use your requests to train their systems... but they could probably have done that anyway with the existing user licence agreement.
It gets even more interesting when you start looking at the amount of data created over time.
in 2010 it's estimated that 2 Zetabytes of data was created globally. In 2025 the prediction is that we'll generate 0.4 Zetabytes PER DAY.
16 million text messages per minute.
The exponential rate of growth is extraordinary and I expect AI is going to drive it even higher.
It's fascinating stuff.
Back in the late noughties there were projects such as seti@home and cosmology@home that meant you could volunteer to use your personal computers processing power when you weren't using it to monitor radio frequencies for signs of alien life or to process space data. There was simply too much data for organisations to be able to process so making a giant network of home computers was a way of achieving what would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.
A sort of home-made datacentre of sorts.
The other really interesting thing is the concept of all this data that Meta and Google and the rest of them actually being YOUR data. So why should they make the money selling it? Well, you can, if you want, sell your own data and get paid for it!
...anyway, I could bang on about this sort of stuff for days.
in 2010 it's estimated that 2 Zetabytes of data was created globally. In 2025 the prediction is that we'll generate 0.4 Zetabytes PER DAY.
16 million text messages per minute.
The exponential rate of growth is extraordinary and I expect AI is going to drive it even higher.
It's fascinating stuff.
Back in the late noughties there were projects such as seti@home and cosmology@home that meant you could volunteer to use your personal computers processing power when you weren't using it to monitor radio frequencies for signs of alien life or to process space data. There was simply too much data for organisations to be able to process so making a giant network of home computers was a way of achieving what would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.
A sort of home-made datacentre of sorts.
The other really interesting thing is the concept of all this data that Meta and Google and the rest of them actually being YOUR data. So why should they make the money selling it? Well, you can, if you want, sell your own data and get paid for it!
...anyway, I could bang on about this sort of stuff for days.
Some of them are underwater....
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Guigsy - User licence agreements are inordinately lengthy and non-negotiable. Likewise the privacy policy. I'm sure you know that.
The legal fiction is that you have actually read and understood them, based on a box that's ticked. Which is complete nonsense in 99.9% of cases, because as a consumer you would need to spend a very long time reading the full T&Cs - who does that? In addition you won't completely understand what they mean, unless you are a trained lawyer whose bread and butter is drafting these contract T&Cs, or you pay for a lawyer to expain the ins and outs including the "boilerplate" clauses. Never happens in reality. "Plain English" is a fiction.
I would love to see a test case in which the Court decides whether a normal consumer is actually bound by these standard T&Cs in such circumstances; and, additionally, whether some of the one-sided clauses are "unfair contract terms" and therefore unenforceable by the Company seeking to rely on them. The companies would probably use the tactic of settling plus a NDA to avoid having their user licence agreements etc tested in Court.
The legal fiction is that you have actually read and understood them, based on a box that's ticked. Which is complete nonsense in 99.9% of cases, because as a consumer you would need to spend a very long time reading the full T&Cs - who does that? In addition you won't completely understand what they mean, unless you are a trained lawyer whose bread and butter is drafting these contract T&Cs, or you pay for a lawyer to expain the ins and outs including the "boilerplate" clauses. Never happens in reality. "Plain English" is a fiction.
I would love to see a test case in which the Court decides whether a normal consumer is actually bound by these standard T&Cs in such circumstances; and, additionally, whether some of the one-sided clauses are "unfair contract terms" and therefore unenforceable by the Company seeking to rely on them. The companies would probably use the tactic of settling plus a NDA to avoid having their user licence agreements etc tested in Court.
And your TV......... and you don't think that your phone is listening to you all the time.
Has been for many years.
........ and you don't think that your phone is listening to you all the time.
My partner sent a picture of a rug she liked but couldn’t find it online, she phoned me and talked about it, every advert that came up on Facebook after our chat was for rugs!
I hadn’t looked so it had to be our chat that set it off
Not me!! I'm dead posh and have one of those TV's in an oak cabinet thats not connected to the Tinternet.
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I bet you take it in the motorhome too!
Not me either.
My last TV was nowhere near as modern as that and it was 15 years ago.
The TV licensing chap actually knocked on the door a couple of months ago after 15 years of threatening and abusive letters.
I didn't even send him home with a flea in his ear because the poor chap must get it 40 times a day. I politely refused to tell him anything including confirming my name, didn't let him in and tried to be as sympathetic with him as possible.
Anyone who doesn't have a licence will know just how abusive and threatening their correspondence is and I flatly refuse to spend any time or effort in informing them that I don't need a licence.
None of the other things I don't need a licence for pester me relentlessly in this way so....
...but it's not his fault. He's just doing his job and it's the organisation he works for I have an issue with.
Anyway....
No. Too heavy. I take it out of the cabinet, rig it up to the 1.2 Gigawatts inverter, coat hanger for aerial. Clever eh? And people say Im as thick as mince!
Data processing/storage now surpasses the aviation industry in creating dangerous emissions - but we all want our phones and computers to work and entertain us.
My wife says she doesn’t need Alexa, she’s got a John, same thing!!
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