It

was funny I was talking to my buddy about why on earth do we need "smart" dishwashers/refrigerators etc and this come across a few days later. It just seems to happen a lot. I was more about a possible shortage of microchips again in the very near future due to the situation with China and Taiwan, but yeah, privacy concerns as well.

You can have your "Alexa", all it wants to do is fight with me and personally?

I don't want the aggravation of fighting with some faceless electronic entity that cant ever find the version of the song thats so readily available on my hard drive.

Who is the prince of the air again?

‘Ask all the time: why do I need this?’ How to stop your vacuum from spying on you

"Even if you’re not gadget-obsessed, the odds are you’ve got at least one smart device at home. So how do you limit the internet of things from listening in?'

(Just don't have them maybe?)

"This month, Amazon inked a deal to acquire smart vacuum company iRobot – the makers of Roomba – for a tidy US$1.7bn. As some see it, if the purchase goes through, that should worry us.

“It’s all about the data,” says David Vaile from the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Privacy advocates such as Vaile are concerned the robot vacuum cleaner will give Amazon access to floor plans of users’ homes, using mapping features some iRobot products already offer.

Amazon are yet to release details about what existing and future iRobot data will be used for; and the company told Reuters that they safeguard customer privacy and do not sell their data."

(Wink wink nod nod...)

"But Vaile says of big tech companies: “They’re about collecting data, and the products and services are really just bait to lure and hopefully lock in unsuspecting data subjects.

“Their opportunities for manipulating you and exploiting you, once they’ve spied on you, are more or less open-ended and getting broader all the time.”

"At its gentlest, data gathered by smart devices can be used by manufacturers to figure out how to more effectively sell you products. At worst, it can mean staff listening to conversations recorded by your smart speakers or sharing your doorbell camera videos with the police. And as with anything internet-connected, there is also a risk of hackers gaining access to your private information."

(Yeah...no thx)

"For Matt Furnell and Justin Kern from JFK Automation, a company that installs smart home systems, the key to data privacy is avoiding cloud-based services and internet-connected devices as much as possible.

“As soon as you connect the internet, from a data privacy point of view, you are in the hands of the manufacturers,” says Furnell. “So you should give them the least amount possible to work with.”

(Amen)

“I have one network that has all of the home automation gear on it and another network that has all of my personal information – our laptops, computer storage, files and stuff like that,” he says. That way if his smart devices are compromised, “they’re segregated from the more important information”.

(Makes sense)

"Something as simple as putting tape on cameras when they’re not in use can help with smart home privacy."

Be particularly mindful of home assistant products with screens. “People don’t necessarily think that the cameras are doing anything,” Kern says. “But they probably are watching what you’re doing.”

I mean if that is what I need to do?

How about I just dont have that shit in my house?

Besides,it takes Alexa 20 minutes of fiddle fartin around not understanding even though I am annunciating as clearly as possible and then when it finds the song I wanted its the wrong version.

This stuff rubs against my grain from the get go and I already more than had my fill of it for a few years etc...It's just not worth the constant reconfiguration aggravation, waste of time etc and then the privacy concerns.

So no thx, you can have it.