7 Alexa Features You Need To Turn OFF Right NOW

all right so we have got some really important things to talk about in today's video if you own an amazon echo device i'm going to be going over seven alexa features that you need to be turning off right away so stay tuned hey everyone welcome back to another video so privacy is a big concern for a lot of people and amazon does not have the best track record for keeping your data private so in this video we're going to be talking about seven different things that you're probably going to want to turn off if you own an amazon echo device now for the remainder of this video i am not going to use the word alexa instead i will be using amazon in replacement hopefully i won't be triggering too many of your devices and before we get started don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss out on future videos like this one with that said let's get started all right the first one that we're going to be covering to me is the most important one which is why i wanted to cover it first and that is amazon sidewalk if you guys are not familiar with amazon sidewalk it is a feature that uses a small portion of your internet bandwidth to extend the range of your ring and amazon devices now that sounds pretty cool right something that you would want you'd want to extend the range of your devices but here is where the problem starts i'm going to read from an email that amazon sent out that says when enabled sidewalk uses a small portion of your internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors so this is not taking a slice of your internet and keeping it within your personal bubble it's extending your internet for your neighbors to use so now your neighbors ring and amazon devices get to use part of your bandwidth going back to the email this setting will apply to all of your supported echo and ring devices that are linked to your amazon account now the big controversy with this is as this is being rolled out you are automatically being enrolled in this feature that is right you don't have the option of turning this feature on it is being turned on for you so if you look right now in your amazon settings you probably have this feature turned on and i'm going to show you how to turn it off we're going to do is we're going to grab our phones to load up our alexa app in the bottom of our alexa app we're going to click on the more button and then we're going to go to settings once you're in settings you're going to click on account settings and then you're going to go down to amazon sidewalk if you see right here mine is enabled so i haven't turned this off yet but we're gonna go ahead and check that off now with this setting here i'm actually a little conflicted by it because in a way i like the setting i like that i can extend my internet usage out to all of my devices and help my neighbors too so one example amazon gives is that if you've got a pet that has a caller with say a tag on and that tag doesn't have a cell service in it so it only has bluetooth or something like that so it's only going to connect to your wi-fi settings if you're in a house and say your dog runs away or runs down the street you can't use that tag anymore because it's not connected to your wi-fi but with this setting right here if everybody in my neighborhood has this feature turned on and my dog runs away say a mile down the road that device is still going to connect to the person's house that my dog is in front of so in theory i can load up the app and see that my dog is in this vicinity which is really helpful and i don't mind helping my neighbors i actually prefer to help my neighbors but what i don't like about it is that a complete stranger can pull up in front of my house and now their device can connect to my wi-fi and that's where i have a problem i'm not a hacker but i would assume a skilled hacker could probably use some kind of backdoor to then take that and get into my network which is a concern for me so for me personally i'm gonna be turning that feature off okay number two on the list is the drop in feature so this is a pretty cool feature that you can set up with family and friends that also have echo devices this is going to allow you to have a phone conversation whether it be it through the echo show a video call or through just an echo device where you can have a voice conversation with this person in a different house and with this feature right here not everybody can do that you actually have to give people permission to be able to drop in but the problem is is that when you set that up and give that person whether it be family member or friend permission to drop in they can now drop in at any time and you don't have to answer that call so that is a bit concerning and something that i would recommend turning off in your settings until you are ready to use it now to turn this feature on and off let's go ahead and load up our amazon app right here just like before we're going to click on the more in the bottom right corner we are going to go to settings and then we're going to go to device settings so once we are in there we're going to select the device that we want to turn this feature on and off from what i understand you have to do this individually per device but if that's not true comment below and let me know if there's a way to just do it to all devices but what we're going to do here is i'm going to go and select my echo show 5. we're going to go down to communication we see that it is enabled and we've got drop in on so we're going to tap on drop in and you've got your different permissions here what we're going to do is i'm going to click on off to turn the drop-in feature off okay next up on the list is hunches this is a feature that is going to ask follow-up questions when you use your amazon devices this feature can be helpful for instance asking if you want to lock your front door or giving you suggestions of things that you can do in the amazon app but there's also going to be times when you're on a phone call and you just want your alexa to stop talking now to turn off hunches we're going to go ahead and load up the amazon app again we're going to click more down in the bottom go to settings and then we're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on hunches and from here we can turn this feature off all right now that we've got this feature turned off we're going to the next one here which is going to be amazon's use of your voice recordings yes if you did not know that amazon keeps a record of everything that you say to that device and it stores it within your profile now it says that it just stores the comments of things that you are saying to your device so you have to say your wake word first for it to record something but is that entirely true we're not sure if you want to manage those recordings or delete them all together you can do that in the app so what we're going to do you're right go ahead and load up the amazon app again we're gonna click on the more option go to settings and then we're going to click on alexa privacy which you see at the bottom of the screen this is going to bring up another page to the amazon environment and from here we can check all of our privacy settings i'm going to go ahead and select on manage your data at the bottom and then from here is where you've got the options so right now we've got disabled that allows me to ask my device to delete things so we can turn that on right here enable deletion of your voice i'm going to go ahead and confirm that so now i can just ask my device to supposedly delete things or the option right below that to choose how long to save recording right now by default it is save recordings until i delete them and i bet most of you had not deleted your recordings so if i tap on this let's get the other options that we have we can have it save the recordings for 18 months three months or don't save my recordings at all that is also an option for you for me i think that i'm actually going to save mine for three months i might change that to not save them at all but i think as of right now i'm gonna go ahead and just say save them for three months and then go ahead and get rid of them now as you saw there are a lot of different options in here i'll let you guys kind of go through it on your own just for the sake of not making this video too long but there are a lot of options to go through in your amazon privacy section all right sticking to our privacy settings right here the next thing that we're going to be talking about is skill permission now amazon has renamed their third-party apps to call them skills and as you install and set up skills with your devices right here you do give those skills certain permissions to view certain things and over the years those things just collect and build up some of them you may not even use anymore but in the settings right here we can actually go through and what i'd recommend is checking all of these settings right here to make sure that nobody has access to something that you don't want them to so we've got the privacy settings still loaded up second from the bottom here is manage skill permissions so we're going to tap on that and it's going to have all of these different settings in here that you can tap on to see who has permission to different things so the first one that i have loaded up here is my street address so who has access to my street address thankfully none of the apps do but i would recommend going through each one of these settings right here see who has permissions to different things and possibly disabling those if you are not using them anymore alright the next thing that i recommend turning off are going to be your echo device cameras this might seem pretty simple but it is an easy one to forget hacking laptop cameras and webcams is a pretty popular thing for hackers to do and to avoid that all together it's safe to just keep your cameras off now with the echo devices this is going to be an easy thing to do because each device has a physical shutter that you can shut so you're just going to shut that shutter i would recommend keeping it shut unless you are actually using the device okay so number seven on the list is not gonna be something that you're gonna turn off it's actually gonna be something you're going to turn on and that is brief mode you may notice that your amazon devices repeat a lot of the things that you ask it to do this can be helpful so you know it got it right but it can also get pretty annoying as time goes on so a good way to do that is to turn on a brief mode so that way when you're asking it to play a song instead of it repeating everything with the artist and title and everything for the song it's just going to give you a beep or a ding that it hurts you and it's going to do that now to turn on brief mode we're going to load up our app one last time click on the more tab go to settings and then at the very bottom of the page we see a voice responses we're going to click on that and then here is where we can enable brief mode whisper mode and even celebrity voices if we want to do that whisper mode is another one that i would recommend turning on it's a pretty fun feature unless you're creeped out by something whispering back to you and in fact i did a video on 10 surprising things that you can do with your amazon device i will link it above if you guys want to check that out but in there i go over the whisper mode but here is where you're going to turn on brief mode anyway i hope you guys found some value in this video if so give it a thumbs up let me know that you liked it comment below and let me know what you think about some of these features and them automatically be turned on as a reminder don't forget to subscribe for more content like this and i'll see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Steve DOES

Views: 1,455,495

Keywords: amazon alexa, amazon, coolest alexa skills, funny alexa skills, top skills for alexa, best alexa show skills, best alexa spot skills, most popular alexa skills, what can alexa do, best uses for alexa, alexa echo, everyday uses, alexa tips, echo skills, alexa skills, amazon echo, Best Tech Reviews, amazon top tips, amazon echo plus, new amazon echo dot, echo features, amazon echo devices, things to do with alexa, things to do with echo dot, things to do with echo show

Id: NHswkfcpz_M

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020