Adam Clark Estes of Gizmodo has written a terrific article on what the Amazon Alexa represents as a backdoor into the personal privacy of consumers.
The "money shot," which should give every Amazon Alexa owner pause is the notion that there is a microphone in your house, and you do NOT have final control over when it gets activated.
Let me repeat that. Amazon is on record as stating that they have a team of thousands that listen into excerpts of user sessions to better improve the product. That control is bound by a Terms of Service, written by Amazon, which gives Amazon a lot of latitude, which can be updated at any time, and which, by virtue of the United States having no meaningful federal protective policies when it comes to privacy, largely trusts the industry to self-police.
Also, as the article notes, and as any Alexa owner can attest, Alexa is subject to false positives where the user said something that was not intended for Alexa, but Alexa interpreted differently and recorded anyway.
This is bad, and let me tell you why. If you've been paying attention to Facebook's numerous transgressions, obfuscations and outright lies when it comes to (mis) appropriating and failing to protect consumer data (e.g., a recent $5B fine), you should know that:
- Facebook is just an easy and obvious example of how economic self-interest can lead to some really heinous outcomes.
- As Cambridge Analytica's mis-use of Facebook data in the 2016 election shows, it takes very little data to build a powerful profile on a consumer that is exploitable in numerous ways.
- Security is the other side of the privacy coin, and as the joke about security breaches goes, there are two kinds of people. Those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't; the point being that most everything is hackable in some form, and the hackers are more sophisticated than those protecting against hacks, especially in the realm of the Internet of Things. Just imagine a bad actor securing programmatic control over every Alexa device, searching for certain incriminating key words, which accrue in your personal file in the cloud, and the bad outcomes that can yield (blackmail, self-incrimination, robbery, etc).
- As a sanity check, ask yourself this. Were it the federal government wanting to a put a smart speaker in everyone's house, most people would (rightfully) lose their shit. But call it Alexa, and market it as a humanizing, pithy consumer device, and it's suddenly a stocking stuffer.
Listen, I love Amazon as much as any consumer, but I also know this indelible truth:
Digital lasts forever - like, literally - but Terms of Service only last until there's a Regime Change or a Business Model Change, and that's an asymmetry that should give every consumer serious pause.
Put another way, we all have a responsibility not to put ourselves in a place where just by living our lives as we are, we could encounter “existential risk,” and however low a probability you may attach to this calculus, it's certainly non-zero, and the potential risk is indeed existential.
Food for thought.
UPDATE: There is a new story that Google employees are eavesdropping in customer's homes via Google Home Speakers. I say it again and again. The difference between an Apple device, and a Google Home/Amazon Alexa/Facebook device is that the former does not make its money by monetizing better forms of surveillance. You have to see people and businesses in terms of their motivations. What you incent is what you reap.
Related: Is Facebook a Brand you can Trust? (O'Reilly Radar)
