Amazon Announces New Spying Initiative for Alexa

You thought your little Alexa devices were a privacy nightmare before? Well, the situation has only gotten grimmer. As part of its rollout of the "Alexa+" generative AI update — a phrase already weighted with dystopic portents — Amazon is changing it so that none of the requests you make to the tiny-speaker-cum-virtual assistants can be stored and processed locally, Ars Technica reports. Now, all of that must be done on the Cloud. And that means that going forward, everything you tell Alexa will be stored — forever — on Amazon's servers. Once, users had the option to opt out of this, but no more. Last week, Amazon sent an email to customers confirming that the "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" setting will no longer be available starting on March 28. "As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature," Amazon wrote in the email, per Ars. The alarming c ... Read full article.