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forced to buy an echo for new house. any suggestions? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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my family is moving into a much bigger house than we used to have. we use amazon echos as an intercom system through the announcement feature. because our house is bigger, i’m being forced to get one myself for my room. i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this and are forcing me to get one. what can i do to limit its tracking?

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[–] 10 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

MSCHF made a device called an Alexagate, which jams the microphones using ultrasound and is turned on and off by clapping.

It's a bit expensive, though ($100).

https://alexagate.com/

Otherwise, as you mentioned, you can use DNS to block the tracking. NextDNS has a built-in blocklist specifically for Alexa.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    thanks for the suggestion! as for nextDNS, i was already thinking of using this however you cannot change the DNS servers used on alexa devices. i was thinking of setting up openWRT on a pi and using that as a router specifically for our alexa devices with a nextDNS profile installed, but im not sure if alexa’s default to the router’s DNS or amazon’s. even if it does use the router’s DNS, does it backup to Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8) like Roku does?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I specify my LAN DNS servers (2 pihole instances, main + a backup for redundancy) in my routers DHCP settings, so they are the DNS servers handed out to all LAN clients; then I have an iptables rule on the router blocking all port 53 traffic from leaving the network unless it came from those LAN DNS servers. This means only the piholes can reach external dns; everything else is required to use the LAN DNS servers or receive no response. Then the piholes have full control over what can and cannot resolve to an IP.

    I haven't found a device that doesn't work with this setup. I used to have a couple google homes before I wised up, they worked fine behind this setup.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wow thats very interesting. Ill try to so the same on my network

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