- Alexa users who are Amazon Prime members are reportedly being automatically upgraded to Alexa Plus.
- Users who have been upgraded can revert to the old Alexa by saying, “Alexa, exit Alexa Plus.”
- One user claims that they were “flooded with ads” after downgrading back to Alexa.
Maybe I’m now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.
My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I’m probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.
Yeah - do you have a tv? It is a smart one right? With the wiretap built in?
You allow your TV to access the internet?
I tried to, the clients were so awful I bought a streaming stick. Now it just spies on me. without trying to hide a pc near my tv, and work out a remote control that’s not an awful keyboard and mouse there aren’t a lot of good options.
The TV is blocked, the streaming device is pieholed as best i can. I’m sure someone still knows I watch an unhealthy amount of Futurama.
I have a life and don’t have time setting up networks. Yes it’s wired to the internet
I have two smart TVs in the house, but they don’t have access to my network. I don’t use the smart features.
No. I haven’t had a TV since around 2000. I use monitors, and always have an extra laying around if needed.
Even monitors are being equipped with spyware “smart” features. It seems a matter of time before all new monitors are spyware and adware Trojans like TVs. 😞
Get commercial hardware. It’s more expensive new, but dirt cheap used, and they don’t include any of the spy equipment.
Commercial tv? Doesn’t exist
Actually they do. We use them for menu boards all the time. Totally different software in them even.
They do, they just call them display panels.
I was just looking into this and I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it before. It makes sense that businesses wouldn’t tolerate that nonsense. Thank you for the life hack, it will be very useful!
My "smart"TV is not online at all but I still see ads that seem targeted for the most part. OTA is a dying platform I think, though
This is not at all surprising. We got rid of prime about a year ago and generally have avoided buying through Amazon, but on a few occasions, it’s been the only option so we bit the bullet. It was awful.
Prices and shipping listed were for prime members (autoselected of course) with small print nonprime member prices selectable. Their once famously easy purchase process was multiple screens full of “don’t you want to rejoin prime??” pages with the option “join” already checked. Even after selecting the nonmember price and saying no to prime, going to the checkout page revealed an option auto checked for ‘faster shipping’ that was actually an option for rejoining prime. In buying multiple items this was autoselected on each of them separately, so you’re agreeing to prime if you miss changing one.
Even if I have to order from them periodically (which I avoid like the plague), I have no intention of paying for prime again. The whole purchase process is an indicator that dropping prime is making an impact and I want that message to sink in.
For those who have Alexa, downgrading the plan, or even better-- finding an alternative home assistant, will send an equally powerful message, even if Amazon isn’t ready to hear it.
Not surprising. I had to remove my credit card information from Amazon because I kept getting automatically signed up for Prime without my consent.
There a class action lawsuit with a payout. Should be automatic, I hope.
Don’t they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?
Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump’s inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.
I dumped Amazon ten years ago, when I got scammed by a third party seller and Amazon did fuck-all to help. Amazon doesn’t extend the same protections to third party sellers, I suppose that’s in the TOS, which I’m sure everyone has read carefully.
I could go into detail how the scam worked, and probably still does work. The jist is, shippers don’t provide full addresses to Amazon, only the zip code. So, if the scammer shows that they have a shipping receipt for a zip code, Amazon just trusts that the box was shipped to the correct address. Turns out they shipped an empty box to a local restaurant–it took a lot of calls to find that out.
AND there are many “free” tracking apps where people are tricked to give their valid tracking codes to see the shipment status. The owner then resells those valid tracking codes in bulk to scammers
Glad I dropped prime when I did then. The videos should be sectorized so as to be available on a non-prime account though
They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”
It worked for Microsoft. The month after they started to force install Teams in windows they published user numbers showing how teams had sprinted ahead of Slack by that metric, and the tech press mostly ate it up.
Wtf is alexa? Voice bot? Why do people need that
Its a CIA-style listening device that people pay for and proudly install and display in their home, gathering data on them, sharing it with Amazon and anyone they care to sell or make that data available to - including police.
Ostensibly all to provide short voice answers and actions they could do privately with their phone in seconds.
Call me old, but save for my phone, I don’t have any ‘smart’ anything. My desktop is running linux mint and my webcam is more than 12 or 13 years old and it is unplugged when not in use. I am doing just fine, thank you. My phone is probably listening to me, but all it hears is youtube political commentary videos against Trump.
The ads I get are super generic and talking about shit I REALLY don’t care about or apply to me, so I think that I am doing fine when it comes to ad avoidance.
Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are “copilot” users.
Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!
Enshitification is running its natural course. The best opt-out is removing the subscription. Why pay for tv.
Likely only ever happens if a critical number of people stop being customers there.
I have the original Echo, and it still works. For some reason I had it running and it had an alert recently. So I asked what it was, and Alexa promoted being able to upgrade and told me how it’s so much better and stuff. And told me I just had to give it the go to upgrade.
So I did. And then AND THEN it told me my device is too old.
Fucking POS. I unplugged it again. I use it as a stand for my HomePod Mini.
I have a HomePod household and I’m getting ready to kill that off honestly. Apple using Gemini for Siri later this year has me finally pull them out and doing locally hosted assistant stuff.
I disconnected my Echo devices when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out. I’m not even sure what Alexa Plus even is. I was back at my parent’s house for the holidays and they still have Echo devices. Mine never just randomly started announcing stuff but oh man they do now. Like I’m just sitting there reading a book in a dead silent room and it scares the crap out of me just prattling on.
Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.
