Eliana Willis

Amazon/ZDNETAmazon is curtailing a privacy-minded feature that will affect owners of certain Echo devices.In an email sent last Friday to a number of customers, Amazon revealed that as of March 28, it will remove an opt-in setting that prevented audio of your Alexa requests from being shared with the company. Available to users with certain Echo devices, this option processes your Alexa requests locally instead of sending their recordings to the cloud.Also: Echo Pop vs Echo Dot: Which Alexa speaker should you choose?Though this option sounds like it should have been available to all Alexa users, it was limited to those with the Echo Dot 4th generation, Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 devices and only to people in the US with English set as their language. To enable this in the Alexa app, at least until March 28, select the supported Echo device and tap Settings. From there, turn on the switch for “Do Not Send Voice Recordings.”With this option soon to be disabled, does that open up Alexa users to privacy risks?To address such concerns, Amazon will automatically update the privacy settings for affected users to not save voice recordings, a company spokesperson told ZDNET. In this case, the recordings are still shared with Amazon. But those recordings will then be deleted after the request has been answered. Amazon will also remove any previous recordings still accessible. More

ZDNETSince 2014, Google’s Chromecast has been an affordable means for helping viewers turn their older model TVs into smart TVs, allowing them to stream content from their phones, tablets, and computers to a bigger screen. Alas, the era of the Chromecast has come to an end. Google is replacing it with the Google TV Streamer, promising a faster processor, Thread and Matter integration, and the ability to summarize TV episodes or whole seasons, among other new tricks.Also: ‘Untrusted device’ errors on Chromecast? Google is rolling out a fixBut that doesn’t mean the Chromecast is obsolete yet; in fact, Google has promised to continue providing software and security updates for now. I found a number of cool things anyone can do with their trusty Chromecast that most users are unaware of. More