Cleanse

Day Nineteen: Adios, Alexa!

A smart speaker, tall silver cylinder, with blue colored lights at the top.
"Smart" home or surveillance device? You decide. (Credit: Amazon Alexa)

Table of Contents

Open Mic Night -- Every Night

A few years ago companies lobbied for the ability to put an open microphone in our homes to record everything we said and did, to run voice recognition software on everything we say (or call in human experts when it's not discernable) and stored it in their servers ad infinitum. And everyone rose up in protest ...

... Actually no they didn't. Instead everyone said, "Ooooh how convenient!" And bought said open microphone linked to a Big Tech company to install proudly in their homes as some weird conspicuous consumption thing to show off how futuristic and on-trend they are.

This wasn't so hard, because the companies basically gave them away! There were all these promotions, like $25 for an Echo Dot, and the devices looked so cute and friendly with their rainbow LED lights that they seemed completely innocuous and fantastic.

As someone whose family members grew up in Eastern Europe where their houses and offices were regularly bugged, this boggles my mind. An open mic. In the house. A direct line from your bedroom to Jeff Bezos' servers.

And what do people use these "smart systems" for? Primarily, research shows, it's setting timers and listening to music. Sometimes buying things but not really. Mostly timers and music.

These are things you don't need a smart speaker to do for you!

So today we are going to ditch your "smart" device because it is a privacy hole right smack in the middle of your home.

Go ahead and unplug it. Put it in the basement, or under your bed, or on a high shelf out of the way. Try out your life without it for a month and see how you can replace what you truly, truly need.

And if you don't have a smart speaker, chances are you ask Siri stuff on your phone, or Cortana, or Bixby, or whoever. Or you talk to your watch.

Turn it all off. All of it. (Siri, Cortana, Bixby...) You don''t need an open mic permanently listening for cues. (Bonus: you'll probably also save on battery charge).

A Data Sovereignty Nightmare

The thing about phones and devices that appear to be "smart" is that it is still hard to run complete voice recognition systems just on the device. Everything has to be sent to the cloud for processing, then return back to the device as if it were listening by itself. 

So what you say is leaving your house and stuffing someone else's servers. Bravo, we are truly living in the future now, definitely not a 1950's Russian spy drama.

Increasingly, people are figuring out how to do more on the device for full data sovereignty, but it's still far from comprehensive. Some companies have been working on this problem for a long time. So have open source afficionados.

ChatGPT has changed a lot of this, but not all of it. And even Large Language Models that power today's AI systems require a ton of computing power -- most of which is off-the-box, in someone else's cloud.

Suffice to say there is no direct, total replacement for Alexa, Google Home, or Siri or Cortana, because these are Big Tech gateways that required the full commercial power of those enormous companies behind them to run and to monetize.

If you are looking for privacy and data management, you have to turn them off. Say Sayonara, Siri. Bye-Bye, Bixby. Cya later, Cortana. You get the picture.

The Simple Way to Replace Alexa

This is really very simple, and I am not being facetious here. Most of what we use Alexas for is timers and music. Those are easy to fix.

First, buy a timer. Buy whichever one you want, it doesn't matter. Buy more than one. Go crazy. As long as it isn't internet enabled, you're good.

For instance, we have about five of these all over our house, in every room. Simple.

Definitely have one that's easy to use in your kitchen. Preferably one with a one-press button to get a minute or ten minutes. If you're overwhelmed by choice, let the chefs choose.

For music, you have a few options:

  • Get a speaker with bluetooth and pair it to your phone or whatever you play music from. There are lots of great ones that just stay in your house. Get whichever one you prefer. We have several small, inexpensive ones and they are all over our home.
  • Get a bluetooth receiver that you hook up to your home speakers and audio system. There's one from Audioengine, Klipsch, or Sonos. That way you can pair a device to play wirelessly in the home and it will come out your HiFi system.
  • Sonos is more of an investment, but it does include the ability to manage your music and speakers with voice commands.
  • Get a CD player or an MP3 Player, load it up with your favorite tunes, and keep it handy in the rooms you like to listen in.

On the off-chance that you also use Alexa to build your shopping list for Amazon items, never fear!  Get this app, OurGroceries, which you can sync with a partner and add as many groceries or other shopping items to as many lists as you'd like.

Or you can always input your own items at a computer (it takes ten extra seconds and saves you lots of money because you won't buy as much). 

If you use Siri to dictate search terms in your car while driving, just pull over and type it out. The extra twelve seconds will not kill you.

The above will replace about 90% (or maybe as much as 99%!) of your Alexa's daily functions in your home. Everything else you can probably do yourself. Bonus points for not having an open microphone in your home.

Advanced Ways to Replace Alexa

If you use your Alexa or other smart speaker system to manage your smart home, you'll need a more elaborate setup. I spent most of the pandemic building and experimenting with virtual assistants in the home, hacking and building things with Raspberry Pi's (not actually pie). I wish I could say the market is flush with alternatives, but the limits of on-the-box processing are still limits, even if the frontier for this technology is changing.

That said, one open source product has really risen to the top in recent years and is relatively easy to use and set up: HomeAssistant

This is an entirely in-house set up: you own and control your own home data. It does not go to anyone else's cloud. At the same time, you can "tunnel in" from out of the house to continue to check on your smart devices and so on. They even have apps for iOS and Android that make this even easier.

Excitingly, HomeAssistant now offers more of a plug and play option for beginners. That means you can buy the physical device (HomeAssistant Green, for instance)  that manages your home network and it is relatively straightforward to set up. Or you can always try to host it yourself on a Raspberry Pi or some other local device (they keep a long list).

HomeAssistant is compatible with basically every "Internet of Things" enabled object out there. Smart lightbulbs. Smart doorbells. Garage door openers, sensors of every kind. So if your sense of living in the future is that you can turn on your lights from an app (instead of crossing the room and flipping a switch), then HomeAssistant is for you.

And all the Rest ...

Nest. Ring. Your smart fridge or your smart TV. These devices are surveillance apparatuses in your home.

Maybe you find it convenient that when you go on vacation you can check on your neighborhood and your house, or turn your thermostat up or down. But Google or Amazon don't need to do that for you. The company doesn't need to know when you're at home or out, which it can infer based on when the lights and the heat are on or off.

Samsung even warns people not to talk about anything secret in front of their televisions, because their Smart TVs are listening.

And Ring turns home surveillance into a neighborhood NIMBY game, where everyone can watch everyone else's footage. My colleagues have even written about this in a paper called: "The Cop In Your Neighbor's Doorbell: Amazon Ring and the Spread of Participatory Mass Surveillance." Two of my former students (now at Cornell and Stanford as professors) have also published about this in a paper they entitled, "Surveillance deputies: When ordinary people surveil for the state."

When they put it that way, it doesn't sound quite so friendly or futuristic, does it?

The peace of mind you apparently glean from being able to watch your house on someone else's cloud app all day should, by this point in the cyber cleanse, be radically displaced by the peace of mind you'll have if you stop stuffing company servers with your intimate home data.

If that kind of surveillance is something that matters to you, I strongly recommend HomeAssistant. People before you have looked for the devices they want to replace (like smart doorbells) and left thoughtful comments on the forums to help others find their way.  You can even run cameras in your home and watch them from the outside, without a Big Tech cloud service in the way. 

In may ways, that's even more futuristic.

What about truly intimate data?

If you have a smartwatch or a fitbit, or some other fitness tracker, and you are female, please check my work on reproductive privacy. Slight changes in body temperature are indicative of ovulation and, depending on your jurisdiction, should absolutely not be passively monitored or stored in someone else's cloud.

It could be a better future

Most people's homes are suffused with surveillance tech that just looks like consumer-grade, run of the mill, everyday technologies. But to make objects "smart" takes a lot of recording, a lot of storage space and processing power, and cloud services well beyond your doorstep. It also stuffs company servers and can be used for purposes you certainly did not intend.

Is the future one of total surveillance and a pacified populace? Or are we going to wake up and take the power--and our data--back into our own hands?

You have a choice, and your choices will help propel the next generation of technology solutions. You can start today. Let's help bring about a future where people will no longer accept being bugged in their own homes in exchange for a kitchen timer.