Worried Alexa is spying on you? This $99 gadget will stop it from listening

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Worried Alexa is spying on you? This $99 gadget volition end it from listening

(Image credit: MSCHF)

Earlier this twelvemonth, we had the Paranoid. At present, it's the Alexagate. Both are devices that disable the microphones on Alexa or Google Domicile devices, calculation more cost to your smart-domicile convenience in the proper name of privacy.

The Alexagate, like the Paranoid Home Wave, clamps onto your Amazon Repeat device and jams the microphone by emitting loud ultrasonic sounds, out of range of human hearing simply peradventure not your dog'south. Nonetheless, at $99, the Alexagate costs twice equally much as whatsoever of the iii $49 Paranoid devices, besides as the Echo Dot.

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That may exist because, like the Clapper of infomercials past, the Alexagate tin can be toggled off and on by 3 loud claps. And so if you want Alexa to dim the lights or open up the door, just handclapping iii times and voila! — Amazon's vocalization banana can get-go listening to you again.

Or, you tin can just turn off the Amazon Echo'southward microphone.

Alexagate is made by MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based business firm that seems to specialize in quirky and annoying tech gadgets and stunts.

In that location's a shirt made of other brands' logos; a Chrome extension that lets you lookout man Netflix at work past disguising it as a conference telephone call; a bell fabricated from a squeaky rubber chicken; the Cuss Collar, "a collar that curses whenever your dog barks"; and a Slack aqueduct that recreates every episode of The Function, amid other things. (Business organisation Insider did a fun contour of the company several months ago.)

It's worth checking out the MSCHF website just for its impressive arty-industrial reworking of how a site should comport. As for whether y'all should shell out $99 for an Alexagate to go with your $49 Echo Dot, that'southward up to yous.

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has as well been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting effectually in the information-security space for more than than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and fifty-fifty moderated a console discussion at the CEDIA dwelling house-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/alexagate-alexa-mute

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