Solution to blocking home recording

Hardware

A site affiliated with another that’s in my personal doghouse published this about these new generation of personal home assistants:

It’s a pretty well-known fact that Alexa-enabled devices and Google Home products record everything you say to them. What you may not know is how to delete these recordings or turn this feature off entirely. In the video above, I show you how.

There’s a better solution: don’t introduce these devices to your home if you feel you can’t trust them. Some electronics are essentials in modern society. Barring specific circumstances, these are not. And in the meantime we let companies think we’re okay with this behavior by buying these devices.

As for the site in question, they were the ones who used a photo of me and asked their readers if they were willing to look as stupid. When I called them out for their bad faith use of my image, they said they had permission to under Creative Commons. This was a lie; it was published with ShareAlike which they were violating. Not that I hold it against them or anything.

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Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

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