my family is moving into a much bigger house than we used to have. we use amazon echos as an intercom system through the announcement feature. because our house is bigger, i’m being forced to get one myself for my room. i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this and are forcing me to get one. what can i do to limit its tracking?
Get one with a hardware switch to mute the mic.
The microphone disable switch on every google home/amazon alexa device does not physically disable the microphone; it just informs the software that you’d like it to not listen to you. It can still do so whenever it pleases.
This is how/why it is able to respond ‘your microphone is currently disabled’ when you try to command it with that switch on.
I had thought teardowns proved this wrong and that some of the devices were hardware and/or a separate chip/software stack?
Pretty sure that the very first gen Google ?dot? Mini speaker has physical disconnect.