Yup, this is it. Your Echo got a notification that said, "hey, your owner ordered a new tablet, so when it gets powered on, it's okay to connect it to your Wi-Fi." Once it got on your Wi-Fi, Amazon could attach it to your account.
Odds are part of the setup/config info that is initially transferred to it includes account number info, so when it gets access to the local wifi, it also phones home with a "hey, I'm device ID# and am initially registering under account #xxxx".
I really feel like the process should include a confirmation, or at least be something I intentionally enabled rather than being on by default.
Reduced customer support costs are more important than privacy and security. Wait until you hear about Amazon automatically sharing your local wifi with others! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...matically-share-your-internet-with-neighbors/
I'd heard about that and disabled it a while back because people were (rightly) bitching about it online. I couldn't find a single article complaining about Frustration-Free setup being on by default. It's incredibly frustrating considering all of the tedious 2FA bullshit I have to wade through to do mundane things every day to find out that Alexa is handing out my WiFi password and access to my Amazon account to anyone who asks the right question like the goddamn Fisher King.
They're going through the same thing that WiFi manufacturers went through... everything was insecure by default because it was easier to setup, and it wasn't until there was a pushback that caused them to get their shit together a bit. I think the new echos/dots/whatevers are just too new for people to force that "get your shit together" in place yet, so they're taking advantage of it until there is that public pressure.
It could very well be that the request is signed/encrypted using some Amazon keys during the exchange, and that they won't just pass them over to anyone, and they won't do so in clear text. I refused to have any of those spy devices in my house to begin with, so I have no idea.
I'm with you, Nett. We got a free Dot awhile back with a Spotify subscription and I sold that shit the next weekend. The tracking on phones is bad enough. I have noticed I'll just read something online and when I open a new tab to do a search, that thing I read is the first auto suggestion. It'll be really odd, not common terms.
I've got friends who have verified that their echo/spot whatever in their house has caused different adds to show up. A friend intentionally talked about weird shit in front of the Echo, and within 2 days his targeted advertising was reflecting what he was talking about. Lead us to believe that whatever was being talked about was being transmitted back to the Mother Ship for processing. Don't care if it was just algorithms and robots, it was a solid "fuck no" from me.
I assumed that as default even without malicious behavior. The natural language processing code is pretty heavy and I assumed it ran on their servers rather than expecting a small household device to be able to handle it.
I would have never bought it if it hadn't been a gift. The damn thing does very little except piss me off. The only thing I actually use it for is playing music throughout the whole house at the same time. Setting up the same thing with Sonos equipment would have cost 10x-20x as much as a few $40 dots. I have no idea what normal people do with theirs, because most of the other features seem completely useless to me. It's supposed to only listen when woken with the code word. I'm pretty skeptical of that, but I would think that someone would have caught them sending extra traffic. The raw audio would be relatively large and wouldn't be hard to spot with a packet sniffer.
Yep. I've heard other people mention that too Not comfortable with that, at all. I think your phones may do that too, though, to some extent. I don't have a solid example in recent memory but I seem to recall speaking out loud about some topic and it coming up in advertising or as suggested search terms after typing several letters, with no previous web activity on that topic
Yeah... Apple has tried to mitigate that by only having the local device recognize the "Hey Siri" part, and not constantly transmit everything back to the Mother Ship. My understanding is that Amazon passively relays everything, even when it's not in focus via the "hey Siri" equivalent.
It isn't helping my paranoia that the tablet chose to name itself "Clutch's 2nd Fire" considering that I've never owned one before today.
I went through the recordings that Amazon has saved of me interacting with Alexa, so now I have a lot of recordings of myself very drunk and increasingly frustrated while trying to get my speaker to play songs whose titles contain made up words or Alexa keywords. Amusingly, the transcripts censor swear words with asterisks for things like "Alexa just shut the fuck up" or "Alexa what the fuck does the green light mean"