Technology

The old "privacy focused" setting made speech processing local. The new "privacy focused setting" means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won't store the audio after it's been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

This all seems like it's missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you're giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can't always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn't seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it's associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don't need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.