I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day
109 comments
·September 5, 2025nizbit
HPsquared
Most people already have a phone, laptop, maybe a watch, maybe the TV remote.. And lots of apps on each one. Any one of which could be listening in. It's a crazy situation.
oarla
I wish my phone was just listening. It’s actually much worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802
ptx
Android has a button in the quick settings bar to enable/disable the microphone, which helps with this (as long as you trust the OS itself). I keep it disabled most of the time.
m463
I remember years ago, when viruses were common, watching kids use computers...
OK
Install
Accept
[X]
Upgrade
and they never want to clear their cookies and lose their logins.
pixxel
[dead]
IlikeKitties
I don't want to life in a world where i have to setup DMZs, filters and special magic incantations to use my devices without them turning into literal spying device listening to every word i say. What the fuck.
0cf8612b2e1e
We are already here. As the volume of code/technology increases, it should be clear that systems need strong permission boundaries. It is impossible to meaningfully audit all dependencies and services.
If my desktop music player has an exploit, it should not be possible that it can read my SSH keys. Node supply chain hacks keep occurring where your development environment can leak your private data. Mobile OS have this isolation already, but desktop is sure to slowly follow. I think we might eventually get to a point where even code libraries get assigned capabilities (eg libxml does not have network access).
stevage
The thing I found most surprising here was how many devices that person has on their network. In my house, it's a phone and computer per person, plus a chromecast. That's it.
jamesnorden
That would start with not buying a literal spy device from Amazon.
jychang
Meh, your smartphone is already the ultimate spying device that comes with microphones and triangulates your location from 3 cell towers. The government doesn’t need more spyware than that.
stevage
I'm less worried about the government than multinational corporations.
IlikeKitties
My GrapheneOS Phone is pretty safe and I only use my cellphone connection when I have to, thank you for your concern. Event than, it's still a difference between a battery powered device on a metered connection with tiny microphones vs a literal microphone array connected to a hardline.
pixxel
[dead]
aaron695
[dead]
marcroberts
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.
[0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...
gucci-on-fleek
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
AnotherGoodName
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)
chatmasta
I wouldn't trust flipping the fuse to the house because of thundering herd issues. When I restart my router I first disconnect all WiFi clients and unplug the Ethernet connections. Then I let it do its thing, download its mysterious updates, etc. Only when it's solidly online do I reconnect the clients one by one...
theoreticalmal
Do you have smart home devices? And how many user/interactive devices (phones, tables, laptops) do you have? Manually disconnecting and reconnecting WiFi clients would take me hours
bazmattaz
What tool do you use to track bandwidth usage on your network?
gucci-on-fleek
I run nlbw2collectd [0] on an OpenWRT router, and then scrape the data with a standard VictoriaMetrics/Grafana setup. It gives me really nice charts showing when each device is active and how much data it is using.
diggan
Are you also "never using them" like OP and they send/receive that much data? Curious what it is since the Sidewalk thing seems to be limited to 500MB across your account.
gucci-on-fleek
I use them multiple times daily, but essentially only for things like "turn off the lights", "set a timer for 30 minutes", or "add cheese to my shopping list". But “Echo A” is probably my most-used device, so usage doesn't seem to be very correlated with the bandwidth consumed.
HPsquared
Is that usage from doing video calls or streaming?
gucci-on-fleek
No, I essentially only use it for announcements and turning on/off the lights (with some very occasional music streaming). The bandwidth usage appears to be mostly constant 24/7, so I'm not really sure why it's using so much data (but still much less than the OP).
donatj
Came here to say the same. We use our echos a fair bit but our data use is a fraction of that.
rickdeckard
It might be used as a hub for other devices via Amazon sidewalk [0]...
diggan
Seems that'd be easy to confirm, and also seems unlikely to be the reason because of the supposed limits in place.
> Customers can turn Sidewalk on or off at any time from Control Center in the Ring app or Account Settings in the Alexa app
> The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
luma
Sidewalk is LoRA so I think we can be pretty sure it wasn't the source of GBs of data . Anyone freaked out about sidewalk's use of their internet connection hasn't looked at the numbers.
CharlesW
LoRa is Sidewalk's long-haul backup layer, but it uses a mix of BLE, FSK, and LoRa depending on the distance and data requirements.
tinix
> Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
jeroenhd
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.
theoreticalmal
I was able to effectively stop this behavior by shooting my Echo with a rifle. I hope to hang its rent carcass above my fireplace soon
noisy_boy
Provocative: Then why haven't you turned them off?
stevage
They probably have now? Nothing weird about posting a "whoa look what I just discovered".
nickthegreek
i dont understand how people can setup this level of monitoring but not also a pihole.
chrisandchris
Not OP, but if you've got a Ubiquiti device, this is out-of-box (and they're easier to setup than printer WiFi).
null
advael
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
It really seems to me like we are cooked
null
egorfine
You never use them.
Unlike Amazon.
mikelward
I set up a Google Home to show family photos for my grandma.
Got a call soon after that it'd used her monthly home internet allowance.
I guess it didn't cache the wallpaper images.
pointlessone
> doing nothing at all
Doing nothing at all for you.
LorenPechtel
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.
stevage
Wow, people have devices that show ads all day? Vomit.
johnisgood
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Why would anyone do this deliberately to themselves is beyond me.
rickdeckard
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...
And all defaults set? Yeah you’re gonna have a bad time.
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?