Illegal activity was never being discussed.

That’s not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device “listening”.

I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it’s corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.

IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I’ve never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn’t phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don’t leave the device, they’re an offline trigger to get the “actual” content.

I’ll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven’t experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don’t do basic research before making statements?

Tell me you’re not a software developer without telling me you’re not a software developer.

If you’re working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn’t be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings

(italicized is edited in for clarity)

Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.

(Obligatory disclaimer that I’m pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)

They’re not completely wrong, though. If the devices are phoning home when the mic is disabled, then someone would have discovered it by now. There are people who do that shit for fun, and Amazon is a big target.