Amazon Echo is reportedly an internet vampire that uses gigabytes of data per day despite being unused, says owner

An Amazon Echo owner has taken to social media to complain about their smart speakers, saying that the hardware is using too much data even when it's mostly unused. Dave W. Plummer, who helped develop the Windows Task Manager and ported Space Cadet Pinball to Windows, posted on X saying that his two Amazon Echo Show devices, which he said he "never" uses, exceeded 4 GB of data usage in 24 hours.

According to the image Plummer shared, he has two Amazon Echo Show devices, which are smart speakers with a touchscreen interface designed to serve as a hub for smart homes. However, these devices are more than just digital switches; they also connect to the internet to send you notifications, install updates, and potentially sync with your cloud storage to display your pictures. With the screen, Echo Shows also update often to show traffic reports, news stories, and photos.

Plummer doesn't seem to think that Alexa is always listening to him. In a follow-up post, he wrote that "Odds are it's (a) a bug, or (b) they both took big updates that day, or (c) it's cached video content. The Echo Show does video, so for all I know, it's downloading trailers of movies. But it ain't spying, I'd put money on that."

One commenter on Plummer’s post speculated that if the smart speaker hears the activation command, such as “Hey, Google” or “Alexa,” it will record an audio clip of the environment and send it to its servers for processing. So, even if you didn’t call the device, but hear something similar, it will still send information for analysis and recording, which will use up your data.

Other users also pointed to Amazon Sidewalk as the culprit. Sidewalk is a wide mesh network that allows Amazon devices to communicate with each other, even if they’re on the edge of your network, by piggybacking on other Sidewalk-enabled devices. Amazon says that this is a low-bandwidth service and should have a 500 MB cap per account per month, but some commenters recommended turning it off to save on data.

As for the amount of data used by the Amazon Echo, it appears to average out, especially when running a firmware update and syncing files. The only way to know is to check the history of the devices, but if the risk (of both privacy and data usage) is not worth it for you, you can just unplug them to ensure they won’t be listening at all.

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