I've had a ring camera for several years. Historically I've been mostly satisfied with it, but lately they are adding some features that are pretty annoying.

The worst is that they've been adding neighborhood alerts and other proximity alerts, with categories for traffic and weather and lost pets and things like that. Today I got a "community alert" which was actually an advertisement for a local animal shelter. I don't have anything against animal shelters, but my motion detector camera alter is not the correct venue for this message. It's clear that amazon is trying to muscle in on Nextdoor. I don't use Nextdoor. I find it to be like facebook, full of cranks and advertisements and nosey annoying people.
So now I had to wade through a few pages of menus to find where to turn of this new annoyance. Obviously, if I could I would opt out of all new features.

The other annoying thing is that they turned on some AI evaluation of what the camera sees. So I was getting messages like "there's someone with a garden hose on your lawn" or "a person is carrying a cardboard box". There were a few things wrong with this

• I didn't sign up to have this and it slows down the alerts so they are up to 30 seconds after the motion is detected
• The AI sometimes made errors, especially at certain times of day where it misidentified different things in the yard (for example, some place marked by shadow was interpreted as a sidewalk when there isn't a sidewalk there). This happens of course because the AI doesn't know anything about my property, it evaluates everything from scratch each time it looks at an image.
• The ring app started bugging me with upselling messages to pay extra for the AI messages

So yeah. I just wanted to vent about the enshittification of this thing. I'm also aware of the privacy issues of ring cameras and how they're going to use the "pet finder" functionality to keep track of everyone. But this rant isn't really about that more important stuff, just the frustration of how these tech companies won't just leave anything alone because they have different goals than us.

I'm wondering if anyone here might be able to help me with this.

We've bought a Amazon Echo Dot for my Grandma who's no longer able to see very well. The idea was to connect it to her Smart TV so that she would be able to navigate it using voice commands rather than the remote (which she can't see).

I've been able to add the TV as a device on the Alexa app, however I'm unable to get Alexa to carry out any commands on the TV - change the channel, open an app etc.

I believe that what I need to do is connect the TV to the Echo Dot via Bluetooth. Is this correct? Is it functionally a different thing than having something as a device in the app? Currently when I go to the TV under devices and click to manage linked Alexa devices, the Echo Dot is greyed out because it's already paired with a device (presumably the iPad where I've downloaded the app as there are no other devices connected).

If the lack of bluetooth connection is the issue, I'll need to buy a Bluetooth transmitter for the TV has it doesn't have bluetooth capability. So I just wanted to see if anyone had any advice for me before I invest in another piece of tech.

Mods: I put this in Tech because Amazon is a tech company, if this is the wrong group I apologize.

For the last several purchases I have made through Amazon, not only has the advertised "expected delivery date" been wrong, Amazon hasn't even shipped the product by the delivery date. The day I expect an order to arrive, I get a notice from Amazon saying it's "running late" and the new expected delivery date is anywhere from 4 to 10 days away.

This is on top of the fact that I have Amazon Prime. Prime eligible meant "it would be delivered within two days" for the better part of a decade. They slowly transitioned away from that to "two days delivery after it ships," and now it seems like half of everything takes 5-8 days to deliver, even with Prime.

Anyway, the reason I reported them to the FTC because I believe they are advertising misleading or downright incorrect delivery times in hopes of winning your business over a competitor who is honest about their delivery times. If I want a monitor and Best Buy has it for $200 with 3-5 day shipping, and Amazon advertises it being delivered on day 3, I'm probably going to go with Amazon if I'm in urgent need of a monitor. But then the third day rolls around and Amazon indicates "oh, well, it's probably going to be 3-4 more days." If I had known that, I would have just gone with Best Buy, where I know it would have at least been delivered in 5 days; now I'm stuck waiting a week for Amazon.

I don't even know if this is something the FTC cares about. But it should. I encourage everyone to report this if they've encountered the same issue.