And remember kiddies, Alexa is not your friend

[pim]

You are the product ...

www.bbc.com/news/technology-46818797

[pim]

Alexa and Google Assistant aren't clamouring to be heard, they're clamouring to be spoken to


At last, a parasol you can talk to




Google Assistant is also on a mission to conquer your home




North's Focals smart glasses are designed to look just like normal glasses

[KTJ]

Perhaps that explains the following story…

---

from The Washington Post…

In the world's ‘happiest countries’, an increasing
number of young people don't feel well at all

Australia became the latest country to announce new
efforts to combat the growing problem this week.

By RICK NOACK | 7:22AM EST — Thursday, January 10, 2019


Seagulls sit in the water near the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia on Sunday, December 16, 2018.
— Photograph: Steven Saphore/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — In international rankings, there's a club of usual suspects that more often than not does really well. Finland and other Nordic nations often come out on top, be it in quality of life, education or health care. On the other side of the world, New Zealand and Australia appear to have become members of that exclusive club, too, while the United States consistently misses out.

When the United Nations released its annual World Happiness Report last year, these usual suspects made it to the top 10 once again. But more surprisingly, they also led in another, less favorable recent statistic: the ratio of citizens affected by mental health disorders. A separate 2017 study by the World Health Organization concluded that citizens of Australia, besides Americans, Ukrainians and Estonians, were more likely to develop depression than people living anywhere else in the world. Other strongly affected nations included New Zealand and Nordic states such as Finland and Denmark.

Studies with a slightly different research focus or methodology have observed similarly severe or even worse mental health issues among children growing up in poorer countries such as India, and it is likely that mental health issues are substantially under-reported in many developing nations.

But the mental health crisis that increasingly appears to affect young people from wealthier countries has baffled scientists more than other findings that could be explained by inequality or poverty. Australia became the latest country to announce new efforts to combat the growing problem this week, promising on Wednesday to fund mental health programs for young people with an additional $34 million.

“I want our young people to know they are not alone on their journey,” Health Minister Greg Hunt said, according to a government news release.

Researchers acknowledge that the reasons young people are increasingly anxious or depressed are still not fully understood, but recent studies have cited the use of social media and perceptions of not being able to fulfill unrealistic expectations of employers, friends or partners.

Numbers collected by the Mission Australia charity from two years ago already showed a sharp increase in the number of young Australians suffering from mental illness, with about 23 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds impacted. More recently, a government study similarly concluded that about 25 percent of all 16- to 24-year-old Australians are believed to struggle with mental illnesses every year.

“We are talking about an alarming number of young people facing serious mental illness, often in silence and without accessing the help they need,” said Catherine Yeomans, Mission Australia's then-CEO.

The same trend was reported in Sweden, where young citizens were 20 percent more likely to be prescribed anxiety medications in 2013 than they were in 2006. Meanwhile, Finnish researchers have observed an even more severe jump in the years since then. In Helsinki alone, the number of children being treated for mental health issues more than doubled within a decade. In Sweden and in some of the other Nordic countries, researchers concluded that mounting mental health problems among younger people are resulting in a widening life satisfaction gap between generations.

“People in the Nordic region are generally happier than people in other regions of the world, but despite this there are in fact also people in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden who report to be struggling or even suffering,” wrote the authors of the report “In the Shadow of Happiness”, which was released by the Nordic Council of Ministers last year. While 12.3 percent of all Nordic region residents said they were struggling or suffering, that ratio was more than one percentage point higher among 18- to 23-year-olds.

Other researchers caution that growing mental health issues among young people might not be necessarily limited to residents of the nations that perform the best in global statistics, such as Australia and Finland. They say that respondents in countries such as Australia, Sweden and Finland — where access to health care is relatively easy — may be simply more likely to self-report signs of mental illness, skewing the comparability of those rankings and perhaps hiding a more global trend.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Rick Noack currently covers international news from Australia and New Zealand. He is usually based in The Washington Post's Berlin bureau. Previously, he worked for The Post from Washington D.C. as an Arthur F. Burns Fellow and from London. Originally from Germany, he studied at Sciences Po Paris, Johns Hopkins University and King's College London.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/10/worlds-happiest-countries-an-increasing-number-young-people-dont-feel-well-all

[pim]

Oh shove your American obsessions up your clacker KTJ and for once in your miserable life allow a thread to develop without you stepping in to hijack it with irrelevancies.

Meanwhile, back on topic ...

‘Alexa, call my lawyer!’ Are you legally liable if someone makes a purchase using your virtual assistant?

theconversation.com/alexa-call-my-lawyer-are-you-legally-liable-if-someone-makes-a-purchase-using-your-virtual-assistant-109075

When Amazon launched its Alexa virtual assistant in 2014, it probably didn’t think that a bird would expose a potentially significant legal issue with the device. But an African grey parrot named Rocco, living in Blewbury, England, appears to have done just that.

Last month, Rocco made headlines for his habit of secretly ordering goods through his owner’s voice-activated Alexa device, which charges purchases to the linked Amazon account. The African grey species, which is renowned for its ability to mimic human speech, successfully ordered fruit, vegetables, ice-cream, a kettle, light bulbs and a kite.

Virtual assistants such as Alexa are growing in popularity. The number of users worldwide is projected to reach 1.8 billion by 2021. Unlike some rival models, such as Google Home, Alexa does not have individual voice recognition capability. Since Alexa cannot currently be trained to respond only to a selected person, anyone in your home could purchase items through your account.

Rocco’s ability to manipulate Alexa raises an important question: if someone made an unauthorised purchase on your Alexa device, would you be legally liable to pay for it?

The answer lies in contract law.

You are responsible

The setting for voice purchasing via Alexa can only be be switched on or off. That is, either the function is deactivated so that no one can make vocal purchase orders at all, or it’s calibrated to require a vocal confirmation code to authorise purchases.

In the first case, you cannot enjoy one of the technology’s most convenient features. In the second case, you are still susceptible to a third party – human or capable animal – overhearing and mimicking your voice to make illegitimate purchases. You must then act swiftly to cancel the order in time.

Amazon’s Conditions of Use, which govern voice purchasing through Alexa, state:

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account and password and for restricting access to your account, and you agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account or password.

A golden rule of Australian contract law is that once you sign a contract you are deemed to have read, understood and accepted the terms – even if you haven’t. This is also the legal position in the US, whose laws govern the Amazon Conditions of Use.

So, when you sign up to use Alexa, you agree to be responsible for any purchases made on the device by you, your resident parrot, a mischievous friend or relative, or an unwelcome burglar. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the purchase or not.

There are exceptions

If your pet is responsible, you will have a stronger case to avoid paying because animals other than humans lack the legal capacity to enter into contracts, so the transaction would be “voidable”. If a human is to blame, which is more likely, there is a legal exception that might still save you having to pay up.

Under both Australian and US law, where a party to a contract is mistaken about the identity of their counterpart, the contract may be void under the “doctrine of mistake”.

In Australia, this rule applies where parties do not contract face-to-face, which will always be the case when someone orders through Amazon via Alexa. The critical factor is “materiality” – you need to prove that mistaken identity was vitally important to the transaction.

This will be difficult given Amazon has no interest in who specifically is ordering its products, and the Alexa owner would not normally care who at Amazon’s end has processed the order. But the fact someone made a purchase without the owner’s permission in circumstances where they could not reasonably prevent it might suffice as “material” for the courts.

American law is similar. Section 153 of the influential Restatement (Second) of Contracts states that a party can plead mistake and escape the contract where the mistake is material, and:

enforcing the contract would be unconscionable (unjust), or
the other party had reason to know of the mistake or actually caused it through their own fault.
Amazon would never be at fault, nor able to tell if an unauthorised party made a purchase on Alexa, so you would need to prove that the transaction was unjust and that mistaken identity was critically important.

A potential snag is the exception stated in Section 154: this says that Section 153 won’t apply if you and the other party have agreed that you will bear the risk. It might come down to how a court reads the Amazon Conditions of Use.

Legal precedents

Recent US court decisions emphasise that the mistake doctrine won’t apply where the other party’s identity is immaterial or irrelevant. Again, it would certainly be relevant where the Alexa owner had no way of preventing the unauthorised purchase (such as criminal activity). Enforcement would be grossly unfair in that situation.

The courts would probably not be as lenient if it were a friend, relative or pet doing the deed, as their use of Alexa is an assumed risk on the owner’s part. But it is still arguable that the owner should be legally excused because they had no involvement whatsoever in the purchase. The nature and value of the products purchased might also weigh into a court’s assessment.

To avoid a costly lawsuit, Alexa owners should deactivate voice purchasing when the unit is unsupervised, or discretely implement and use a confirmation code for voice purchases.

Users should also regularly check their accounts to ensure that any unauthorised purchases are picked up early and cancelled in time.

Finally, consider a dog instead of a parrot.

Alexa is definitely not your friend!

[KTJ]

Well, if you are silly enough to use a virtual digital assistant to make decisions, then you deserve everything you get if it all turns to shit.

Mind you, I guess today's silly young people are probably stupid enough to shove decisions onto a digital entity.

Which probably explains the high levels of mental illness in the young as shown up in that article about Australia (NOT America) I posted.

But I guess you couldn't see past the source of the article so automatically presumed I was posting something about America.

[pim]

Oh I knew it was about Australia you dimwit. But as is usual with you, you're so enthralled by America that it had to be an American take on Australia. As if we need the Americans to explain our own country to us.

And that's even before we look at the relevance of your American waste-of-space irrelevant article to this thread.

I don't have Alexa, or any of that hardware and its attendant software. So don't jump to your gratuitous conclusions. However it is a legitimate topic of discussion.

Finally I wish to Christ someone else would post on these threads so we wouldn't have to trip over you and your bullshit.