The system that makes life easier for you is a data collection system for the mega Giant Amazon…
It isn’t just that system…
Things that ‘know’ what you want have to remember that…
Folks?
Amazon does more and MORE THINGS besides just listing and delivering packages…
It is a half a Trillion dollar operation owned by one person….
And it grows like a disease everyday….
You may not realize all the ways Amazon is watching you.
No other Big Tech company reaches deeper into domestic life. Two-thirds of Americans who shop on Amazon own at least one of its smart gadgets, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Amazon now makes (or has acquired) more than two dozen types of domestic devices and services, from the garage to the bathroom.
All devices generate data. But from years of reviewing technology, I’ve learned Amazon collects more data than almost any other company. Amazon says all that personal information helps power an “ambient intelligence” to make your home smart.
It’s the Jetsons dream.
But it’s also a surveillance nightmare. Many of Amazon’s products contribute to its detailed profile of you, helping it know you better than you know yourself.
Amazon says it doesn’t “sell” our data, but there aren’t many U.S. laws to restrict how it uses the information. Data that seems useless today could look different tomorrow after it gets reanalyzed, stolen or handed to a government. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Smart lights, switches or shades integrated with Alexa
Connecting these devices to Alexa allows you to control and automate your home, such as making lights turn off on a schedule, operate by voice or activate automatically when triggered by another sensor or device. Amazon says Alexa can interoperate with over 140,000 products.
What it knows: When and where in your house you turn lights on or off; energy use.
Why that matters: These devices add to a body of seemingly meaningless data that could help Amazon make inferences about daily rituals, power use and more. Amazon says it doesn’t use this data for advertising.
Unlike the privacy settings for Alexa voice recordings, Amazon offers no way to tell it to stop storing data from connected smart-home devices. (You can only set it to auto-delete after 3 or 18 months.) When I downloaded the data Amazon had collected about the third party Alexa-connected devices in my house, it contained more than 600,000 data points since 2019.
“Data enables, improves, and personalizes the features and experiences our customers enjoy,” says Schmidt, the Amazon spokeswoman….