It's still honestly amazing to me that people buy, or want, devices like this, even before considering the downsides. I mean, I don't even like leaving voicemail messages. So the idea of talking to nobody in particular, within my own home, to cause something to happen, totally freaks me out. I really don't need more excuses for physical laziness, either.
I imagine it may contribute to data usage for some people, but from his Youtube videos I don't exactly get the impression this guy gets a lot of foot traffic near his house.
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).
Fwiw i've had long running devices that just constantly ARP broadcast. Affects the local network only but if that's how you measure bandwidth you'll notice it.
Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle.
Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve.
Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)
My gran's power company doesn't like this. When I flipped the main breaker, they saw the load drop and scheduled a crew to investigate and repair[1]. We found out when they called to tell us off after they saw the load restored in few minutes.
[1] It's an old house and hard to tell which outlets and lights are on which circuits, and which of the multiply-rewritten labels in the breaker panel are true, so the main breaker seemed the easiest way…
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.
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.
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
Could possibly be solved by blocking connections to device-metrics-us.amazon.com (via the router or a pihole), the devices tend to be quite chatty towards that domain but don't seem to be affected in function if they can't reach it...
Because they continually download and serve commercial ads, upload telemetry, and upload everything they hear regardless of wake word with no way of deleting (per a past privacy-invasive EULA change).
At a minimum, disable the microphone via the switch... which makes them basically worthless and so they've outlived their usefulness.
I used to have the Rumble app installed [1], and I uninstalled it when I saw it was using gigs and gigs of data on my phone, even when I wasn't using the app. I'm sure I opted into some permission at some point, but I really didn't like the idea of them constantly sending data to their site at the expense of my data plan and battery, so I removed it.
Now I think this stuff is the norm though; I guess bandwidth is so abundant and cheap for the average American that they don't realize how much is actually being used?
[1] I'm not conservative but there was a creator I liked that was banned from YouTube and was uploading to Rumble.
Does anybody have suggestions for a device similar to the echo, but with no microphone? I want whole house speakers on a budget, and the Echo's music group feature seems to do what I want, but I have no need for the microphone.
Echo show--of course it uses a decent amount of data. If it's awake it will typically be showing an ad on at least part of it's screen. Some of those have images.
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[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 83.8 ms ] thread[0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk
Unlike Amazon.
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?
Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle.
Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve.
Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)
My gran's power company doesn't like this. When I flipped the main breaker, they saw the load drop and scheduled a crew to investigate and repair[1]. We found out when they called to tell us off after they saw the load restored in few minutes.
[1] It's an old house and hard to tell which outlets and lights are on which circuits, and which of the multiply-rewritten labels in the breaker panel are true, so the main breaker seemed the easiest way…
[0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...
color me shocked.
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
Doing nothing at all for you.
At a minimum, disable the microphone via the switch... which makes them basically worthless and so they've outlived their usefulness.
Now I think this stuff is the norm though; I guess bandwidth is so abundant and cheap for the average American that they don't realize how much is actually being used?
[1] I'm not conservative but there was a creator I liked that was banned from YouTube and was uploading to Rumble.
This is easily fixed by disconnecting and shredding any such devices you own!
I hope this helps!