this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Has there actually been evidence of Alexa or Google homes being used for government surveillance?
Ring doorbells now give their footage to Flock, which can give/sell it to anyone. No warrant necessary. Not exactly what you're asking about, but along the same lines.
And police departments have absolutely bought that information, especially given their notoriously inflated budgets (at least in many cities).
Tbf, it would be pretty strange if law enforcement needed a warrant for flock camera footage, considering they're just freely accessible on the fucking internet /s
Ring, also owned by Amazon, shares their video surveillance with Flock, which contracts with local LE agencies who share it with the feds.
0 warrants required, and ICE is actively using the data against people.
If the data is there a fascist government will absolutely use it. Of course in a democracy that won't happen ... unless you vote for fascists, ooopsie.
The data isn't there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn't send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.
It's can hallucinate the wake word and streams everything after. And that's assuming you trust the manufacturer which, why would you?
Alexa is wildly popular. What has Amazon done to gain everyone's trust? They just offer the cheapest version.
Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?
I just don’t trust corporations 🤷🏻
I'm specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.
And the third talks about "false wakes" being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it's mistaken in doing so), it's not sending back recordings.
The world seems full of people who work as unpaid corporate lawyers. I’ve run into several of these types in person. I imagine that the Venn Diagram of these people and those who snitch on their colleagues is a circle.
Wtf is this crap? Just because I'm taking the approach of siding with reality I must be a bit or corporate stooge?
Google and Amazon do enough real things wrong without needing to make up bullshit conspiracy theories. Like Amazon's abusive labour practices, and…everything about the Audible & Kindle platforms. And Google's support of the American military industrial complex and shoving AI down everyone's throats while making their products actively worse.
Just because something is bad, doesn't mean every single accusation against it is accurate.
And they cannot change this without anyone noticing?
No, they can't. Precisely because of all the people who quite rightly don't trust Google and Amazon, who would notice their devices' network traffic increasing.
Depends on the company. Apple uses a very specific type of chip for the wake word that cannot change the wake word. Alexa is able to change the sound wake word to almost anything, iirc.
That might be true, I honestly don't know. But it doesn't matter to the point I'm making, which is that however the device does it, it's the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.
An autistic teenage hacker banned from having a computer used a fire stick in a hotel room to hack Rockstar games. I think any given 14 year old war driver can hack these devices and listen to your conversations. If the government will work their butts off to install a tap on a landline, how can they not use an Alexa.
At the very least, there's a teenager in your neighborhood listening to every damn thing you say. If you have cameras in your home, they're watching you.
Pretty sure it's illegal for them to confirm that this has happened. Most of the spying is to manipulate your shopping patterns and learn how to make the most profit from you.
Think Las Vegas casino levels of manipulation and then some.
Yes I think the Cloud Act forbids telling the customers that an agency has accessed their data. Not that Google or Amazon would want to tell anyway
They got caught sending info to their data banks they said they would not, and listening all the time even when they said they would not.
All of these smart devices do. If it is connected to the internet, presume it is spying and will sneak the information back.
The feds in the us buy data broker info, all of it, the cia buys and steals foreigners' too, and distribute it to agencies all the way down to notes, not attributed to source, in the local police's lien, law enforcement information network. Their dossiers on everyone. No warrants or judges, blessed by the supreme court for some time this is not new.
An end run around privacy laws and the bill of rights. Just like 5 eyes end runs spy agencies not being allowed to spy on their countries. They let their ally do it, lead it on paper at least, then share it with them.
All a result of being ruled by lawyers working for plutocrats.
Shhhh, the pitchforks are out, who needs evidence. In all reality, if you were to be wiretapped, an Alexa wouldn't be the best option. Most people already have an internet connected microphone they carry around with them everywhere. And it has multiple cameras too, which are regularly brought into the bathroom with them.
Which is basically what Snowden revealed btw (phone metadata collection, internet traffic interception, data access from tech platforms, fiber-optic cable tapping, smartphone location and metadata)
It's more than that honestly, or less, depending on the perspective. Most people share their data with "only our 900 bestliest partners" or more everyday. Every tweet, login, whatever metafata can be more valuable and easier to compute than voice or video, depending on what you are looking for.
If somebody wants to hack my camera and watch me cut a turd, who am I to deny them?