Technology

Not unless they're overriding the controls for that (Which - yeah that's possible) and TV? hell no. Doorbell? Nah man it just goes ding.

Mine don't.

but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.

...to keep the same amount of data for themselve.

Don't kid yourself. Apple collects the same amount as everyone else does. And if either get hacked, it doesnt matter if they keep it or sell it.

They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.

The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.

Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.

Why would they do that

My parents' ISP router has Alexa integrated into it

A Torment Nexus sounds cool

Yeah, that is a terrible violation of trust. A parent should stop listening when they find out that they have a copy of such conversations of their child. They shouldn't write a newspaper article with citations about it

Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

Because they have no idea why not to. Despite having written the article explaining that clearly.

Yeah, an intercom between you, your kids, and Amazon.

I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn't know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It's like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it's within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn't know the answer to something, I'd think on it for days, weeks. I'd get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends... Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.

The idea that we've gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait "journals" cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we've off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We're all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.

I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.

It's worse now, and it's harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.