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Capitalism: Acer laptops will record you 24/7
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Acer today announced that several of its popular Windows 10 notebook lines are the industry’s first to offer Alexa pre-installed, including the Acer Spin 3 and Acer Spin 5 lines, which are available at retailers now. The news today is the first step in Acer’s plans to roll out Alexa across its PC portfolio.

    Alexa will also be pre-installed on the Acer Nitro 5 Spin convertible gaming notebook line next month. It will also be available on select Aspire, Switch and Swift notebooks, as well as Aspire all-in-one PCs, as they are rolled out to Acer’s retail partners over the next few weeks.

    Additional product lines already purchased by customers will soon be able to be updated with Alexa via the Acer Care Center. The first Acer notebook lines to receive the update will be the Acer Spin 5 and Spin 3 convertible families on May 23 and May 26, respectively.

    “The Acer Spin 3 and Spin 5 convertible notebooks are the ideal products for the industry debut of Alexa voice functionality on notebooks,” said Jerry Kao, President of IT Products Business of Acer Inc. “We are thrilled to be the first to market with these flexible systems, which feature industry-leading audio and the latest technologies for convenient, time-saving and intuitive interactions.”

    “We’re delighted to work with Acer to bring Alexa to customers in new ways,” said Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa. “We believe customers should be able to interact with Alexa wherever they might need her, including from their PCs, in order to take advantage of the simplicity of voice control.”

    Make sure to switch it off, as it'll send all recorded signal back to Amazon and NSA.

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • independentindependent

    Just bought an Acer laptop from their official store. An open-box, has a hardware fault, no reply to several emails. Have bought several of their laptops in the past from this store. 'Nuff said will never buy an Acer laptop ever again..

  • tonalttonalt

    Everybody, wear your folio hats! That's bullshit conspiracy theory, my Acer is not sending anything to NSA.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @tonalt

    It is not bullshit conspiracy theory. :-) Your Acer is just older model. Yet you can still enable Cortana usually, so it'll send all to Microsoft and they will provide to NSA if required.

  • tonalttonalt

    @Vitaliy_Kiselev please provide source links to your claims from well-known and trusted sources.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @tonalt

    Wow.

    Seems like you need some explanation how this systems work. All smart speakers have microphone arrays (notebooks also usually require 3 microphone array).

    This is first stage and it is used to filter out non speech signals.

    Next stage is audio file compression and sending of resulting data file to company cloud.

    Cloud computers do recognition and send back instructions to your speaker, this can also include generated speech response (also compressed file).

    By agreement companies store and can use in their business all of your speech and speaker actions/responses. Similar as to that Google is doing with your search results (including realtime typing recording in address bar, as it is sent by browsers for fast suggestions).

    You can find technical details in API doc sites for corresponding services (Alexa is most popular one).

    About NSA access, for anyone who is not American citizen they directly tap interesting individuals. For US citizens more complex schemes are used usually, normally involving two subsidiaries in third party countries (at least in cases that will require any public hearing).

  • tonalttonalt

    Knew it. No sources.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @tonalt

    :-)

    Are you searching assurances of how good boys are NSA and Amazon? I can upset you - they are both very bad boys who are not on your side.

    Putting such thing in notebooks (this includes Cortana) is unacceptable in any way. As not only NSA or other ruling class dogs can check on you 24/7 in this case. Any boy with good software skill could do it and with properly written software it'll be Alexa application (allowed in firewall) that will be sending all recording to his private server. And as software will pass audio further to Alexa you'll never notice it.

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