EmilyIsTrans

You used polite words, but you were condescending. I'm not interested in whether that was intentional or not, but that is the vibe you gave.

Yeah well, apologies for being a little sassy, but I'm not exactly a big fan of your tone either.

Can you explain to me exactly how moving where profit is recorded from one division to another in the same organization reduces their tax burden? Because, excuse me, I know I only did a year or two of accounting courses before dropping the degree, but that's not how I understand taxes to work.

Also to be turning a profit by "doing well collecting data", the open market value of the data Alexa alone annually generates would need to be around 8% of the entire global data market. If you can justify how millions of instances of "Alexa set a timer for 10 minutes", "Alexa what is the weather", or "Alexa play despacito" generates that much value, maybe you have a point.

It's a good thing their reason is explained very clearly in the article linked in this post. They believed Alexa would have a high "downstream impact", i.e.generate sales or subscriptions elsewhere in the company. Which it has so far failed to do.

having an always on listening device in someone’s home

They very explicitly do not collect audio when you haven't used a wake word or activated it some other way. They will not "know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach" (which is pretty much the only valuable data you've mentioned here), nor will they "have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns" unless you actively discuss it with your device.

I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but if whoever reads this is thinking of replying "are you going to trust that" etc, yes I am. We can track which data an Alexa transmits in real time and directly verify this "always listening" isn't happening. Even if we couldn't independently verify that his is the case, and lets say they contradict their privacy policy and public statements and do it anyway, that's a crazy liability nightmare. Amazon has more than enough lawyers to know that unconsentually recording someone and using that data is very illegal in most places, and would open them up to so many lawsuits if they accidentally leaked or mishandled the data. Take the conspiracy hat off and put your thinking cap on.

Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.

Bad for privacy, but also not a $25 billion dollar source of revenue.

Alexa, Google Home, and Siri devices are not good sources of data. If they were, why would Google, king of kings when it comes to data collection, be cutting their Assistant teams so much?

I'm very skeptical that the data Alexa collects is anywhere near as valuable as people seem to believe it is.

Yeah, for some reason they only let you charge the NES/Famicom controllers as if they were Joycons. The SNES controller just uses USB-C so I don't know why they didn't do that across the board.

But this conversation has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand

They stop their ads for the same reason you don’t shit talk at a funeral: its disrespectful and makes you look like a prick.

I'm using an ✨analogy✨ to explain to you why, even if they are "serious about the topic in the ads", they would stop them when someone dies or a tragedy occurs. Its not some conspiracy about "planned division", it's because speaking ill of someone under those circumstances makes you look like (and be) a disrespectful dick.

I'm not asking if you remember them as an arsehole and speak of them like that. I'm asking if you do that at their funeral.

I'd be interested to hear whether you regularly attend funerals and speak ill of the deceased. They stop their ads for the same reason you don't shit talk at a funeral: its disrespectful and makes you look like a prick.

She drew crosshairs on congressional districts and tweeted it with the text "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD". That is stated in literally the first paragraph of the article your citing, and I can't help but feel you're intentionally misrepresenting it to draw a false equivalency.

An audience member was killed according to ABC News (Australia)