I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day

https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1963803025572770212

45•tosh•2h ago

Comments

mrlinx•2h ago

In 2025, can't believe there's still no open-source alternative to these devices.

verytrivial•2h ago

They're hardware projections into your living space of a massive system run by Amazon. It's the massive system that open-source will have trouble replicating.

mrlinx•2h ago

Spotify multi-speaker playing + a LLM answering questions would cover what 80% of people need.

jamespo•2h ago

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

lupusreal•2h ago

If echoes had an LLM behind them, they might actually be useful as more than voice controlled egg timers..

herculity275•1h ago

Most people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.

danilopopeye•2h ago

I’ve been meaning to try the Home Assistant new voice control[1] for a while. Do you consider it open-source enough? :)

1. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/

NoboruWataya•1h ago

The most serious project I knew in this space was Mycroft, but I just looked it up and they ceased development due to a patent troll.

general1465•31m ago

What would be the use case?

rickdeckard•2h ago

It might be used as a hub for other devices via Amazon sidewalk [0]...

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk

diggan•2h ago

Seems that'd be easy to confirm, and also seems unlikely to be the reason because of the supposed limits in place.

> Customers can turn Sidewalk on or off at any time from Control Center in the Ring app or Account Settings in the Alexa app

> The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.

tinix•2h ago

> Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.

luma•1h ago

Sidewalk is LoRA so I think we can be pretty sure it wasn't the source of GBs of data . Anyone freaked out about sidewalk's use of their internet connection hasn't looked at the numbers.

maxclark•2h ago

He also has a 25 Gbps Internet connection - not really a huge problem here

diggan•2h ago

That's really besides the point, unused devices shouldn't upload/download GB of data per month, it's really simple :)

egorfine•2h ago

You never use them.

Unlike Amazon.

GJim•2h ago

"Smart speakers" should be called by their real name: Smart microphones.

Echo --> Amazons microphone.

brador•1h ago

Listening devices

yupyupyups•1h ago

Bugs

bravetraveler•1h ago

Taps as a service

ozgung•1h ago

All smartphones are also smartmicrophones.

juliangmp•1h ago

Yeah? I mean that's their purpose, why is this surprising to anyone?

lupusreal•1h ago

Usually when this sort of scenario is brought up as a concern, the corporate sycophants crawl out of their holes to gaslight everybody.

noisy_boy•1h ago

Provocative: Then why haven't you turned them off?

nizbit•1h ago

And all defaults set? Yeah you’re gonna have a bad time.

Disable voice recording storage Disable "Help Improve Alexa" Manage skill permissions Turn off Amazon Sidewalk

But in the end you have a 3rd party passive listening device. Depends if you trust that 3rd party I guess.

And after that post on x, I’m sure that person disconnected all the Alexa’s in their home right?

HPsquared•1h ago

Most people already have a phone, laptop, maybe a watch, maybe the TV remote.. And lots of apps on each one. Any one of which could be listening in. It's a crazy situation.

IlikeKitties•1h ago

I don't want to life in a world where i have to setup DMZs, filters and special magic incantations to use my devices without them turning into literal spying device listening to every word i say. What the fuck.

jychang•1h ago

Meh, your smartphone is already the ultimate spying device that comes with microphones and triangulates your location from 3 cell towers. The government doesn’t need more spyware than that.

IlikeKitties•1h ago

My GrapheneOS Phone is pretty safe and I only use my cellphone connection when I have to, thank you for your concern. Event than, it's still a difference between a battery powered device on a metered connection with tiny microphones vs a literal microphone array connected to a hardline.

pandemic_region•58m ago

It's all make believe, they allow you to pretend that they have no power over you and that makes you happy. All good.

IlikeKitties•55m ago

What a retarded take.

jamesnorden•56m ago

That would start with not buying a literal spy device from Amazon.

cubefox•1h ago

By the way, "that person" is Dave Plummer, an ex Microsoft employee. He made things like the Windows Task Manager and the infamous file copy window. His YouTube channel has interesting behind the scenes information on historical Windows decisions.

IlikeKitties•55m ago

Oh it's that guy? yeah, there's another thing he did: Write scammy Scareware [0] which he got sued [1] for and settled [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 [1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/ne [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1593468/internetshield...

cubefox•25m ago

Still arguably a minor sin compared to his botched file copy time estimation algorithm. :)

nizbit•50m ago

So what if it’s Dave Plummer? The name doesn’t make the post any stronger. The problem with his screenshot is the lack of context — network usage by itself doesn’t prove anything malicious or even unusual. Devices like Echo Shows pull constant updates, stream visuals, cache media, and maintain active connections. That can easily add up to gigabytes, even if the owner never directly ‘uses’ them. Acting shocked about it without explaining the why just turns into clickbait.

gucci-on-fleek•1h ago

I also monitor the bandwidth of each device on my network, and my numbers are much lower than his. The totals that I observed over the last 90 days:

  Device         Download     Upload
  ===========  ==========  =========
  Echo Show A   5.487 GiB  1.451 GiB
  Echo Show B   4.343 GiB  1.293 GiB
  Echo A        0.778 GiB  0.739 GiB
  Echo Dot      0.626 GiB  0.580 GiB
  Echo B        0.132 GiB  0.291 GiB
  -----------  ----------  ---------
  Total        11.366 GiB  4.354 GiB

Also note that both devices in the OP are called "echoshow", which means that they have a full LCD display that you could theoretically stream videos on (if you like watching videos on a 5" display with a terrible interface).

HPsquared•1h ago

Is that usage from doing video calls or streaming?

gucci-on-fleek•1h ago

No, I essentially only use it for announcements and turning on/off the lights (with some very occasional music streaming). The bandwidth usage appears to be mostly constant 24/7, so I'm not really sure why it's using so much data (but still much less than the OP).

diggan•1h ago

Are you also "never using them" like OP and they send/receive that much data? Curious what it is since the Sidewalk thing seems to be limited to 500MB across your account.

gucci-on-fleek•1h ago

I use them multiple times daily, but essentially only for things like "turn off the lights", "set a timer for 30 minutes", or "add cheese to my shopping list". But “Echo A” is probably my most-used device, so usage doesn't seem to be very correlated with the bandwidth consumed.

donatj•1h ago

Came here to say the same. We use our echos a fair bit but our data use is a fraction of that.

neuroelectron•1h ago

Seems like something is seriously wrong. This is not normal. It's not caused by "improving Alexa" or Sidewalk.

marcroberts•1h ago

I had a similar issue 2 years ago[0], tracked it down to a device metrics hostname and then blacklisted the DNS for it. That stopped the huge data use and seemed to have zero affect on the device functioning. It's still working just fine today with that host blocked.

[0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...

1oooqooq•55m ago

person buys the literal telescreen from 1984, and is surprised it's the telescreen he paid for.

color me shocked.

advael•49m ago

We have an impossibly pervasive network of sensor blisters littered throughout our lives, to the point where I don't feel comfortable discussing certain sensitive topics in most other people's homes, but every step of the way most normal people have given the same refrain: "oh, the tech companies probably already have all my data anyway"

Now that those tech companies are working closely with an American regime that seems increasingly willing to disregard the rule of law and public perception to round up people they deem undesirable in large numbers and put them in concentration camps, and we have natural language processing tech that can pretty effectively filter through large amounts of text for some semantic analysis, I hear some of the more attentive people coming to the barest hint of a realization that this situation is unacceptably dire

It really seems to me like we are cooked

pointlessone•25m ago

> doing nothing at all

Doing nothing at all for you.

xnx•24m ago

I can only imagine that much data usage if it was trying to compress a 24 hour recording of white noise.

The Anarchic Playgrounds Where Putting Kids at Risk Is the Point

My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek

Ask HN: How long do people spend on coding assignments?

A year in and I still love my MacBook Pro and by extension macOS

Show HN: Google Penalty Checker

Tracking Hiring Patterns Through a Biotech IPO

Building an acoustic camera with UMA-16 and Acoular

ArcheSys – Remote – Software Engineer – Full Time

I Ditched Docker for Podman (and You Should Too)

An Open Letter to OpenAI

We Built an Auto-Aiming Trash Can [video]

The quest to keep OpenAI honest

Tesla Offers Unprecedented $1T Pay Package to Elon Musk

What's //Go:Nosplit for in Golang?

Why everyone is quitting social media

Alpha School: Using AI to Unleash Students and Transform Teaching

OpenAI is building a jobs platform

Earth observation firms trying to solve latency issue with 'Dynamic Targeting'

The unsung solution for our waste crisis: Reuse

NSF Starts Ramping Up the National Quantum Virtual Laboratory

Where startups find early adopters and vice versa

18XX: A System of Systems

Spotify-player – A Spotify player in the terminal with full feature parity

Juno Detects Callisto's "Footprints" in Jupiter's Aurorae – Universe Today

Why ML Needs a New Programming Language

Parallel evaluation comes to Determinate Nix

Incrementally Transform Structured and Unstructured Data from Postgres with AI

Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

White House to Rebrand Pentagon the Department of War

I asked Manus to demo my CLI with asciinema

The Anarchic Playgrounds Where Putting Kids at Risk Is the Point

My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek

Ask HN: How long do people spend on coding assignments?

A year in and I still love my MacBook Pro and by extension macOS

Show HN: Google Penalty Checker

Tracking Hiring Patterns Through a Biotech IPO

Building an acoustic camera with UMA-16 and Acoular

ArcheSys – Remote – Software Engineer – Full Time

I Ditched Docker for Podman (and You Should Too)

An Open Letter to OpenAI

We Built an Auto-Aiming Trash Can [video]

The quest to keep OpenAI honest

Tesla Offers Unprecedented $1T Pay Package to Elon Musk

What's //Go:Nosplit for in Golang?

Why everyone is quitting social media

Alpha School: Using AI to Unleash Students and Transform Teaching

OpenAI is building a jobs platform

Earth observation firms trying to solve latency issue with 'Dynamic Targeting'

The unsung solution for our waste crisis: Reuse

NSF Starts Ramping Up the National Quantum Virtual Laboratory

Where startups find early adopters and vice versa

18XX: A System of Systems

Spotify-player – A Spotify player in the terminal with full feature parity

Juno Detects Callisto's "Footprints" in Jupiter's Aurorae – Universe Today

Why ML Needs a New Programming Language

Parallel evaluation comes to Determinate Nix

Incrementally Transform Structured and Unstructured Data from Postgres with AI

Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

White House to Rebrand Pentagon the Department of War

I asked Manus to demo my CLI with asciinema

I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day

Comments