I don't understand why anyone would want to have such a device in their home. How long before they start data mining conversations for better ad targeting? What if a state actor gets access to such devices?
There's enabling state spying and then there's doing so knowingly and then there's doing so provably knowingly. Which do you trust?
Do you think devices like this have no remote vulnerabilities, that nation states don't have the resources to find and exploit them, or that they can but don't?
Yesterday on CNBC Jason Calacanis in response to the question.
Question: "Jason you don't worry about the data Alexa is collecting on you and your conversations that you're having unwittingly around this device?
Answer: "Your privacy is an Illusion, uhh it's been gone for many years, the NSA is listening to any coversation it wants to through your phone already. So the idea that we have any privacy at this point is sort of laughable... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9fnY5rIjb4
In case you are wondering he's bullish on the Echo and Amazon
I've seen the ads my Kindle Paperwhite displays as a screensaver, and... no, I'm not worried about Amazon mining my personal information to start doing better ad targeting.
That might be more the fault of the advertisers than Amazon. Amazon knows what books you will like with a high degree of certainty, but they don't always have ads available that are a close match, and some advertisers set their targeting very broadly because they don't care (they want a wide reach, e.g. for rank boosting) or don't know better.
You're probably not too far off (although nowhere else in Amazon's ecosystem have I seen very good recommendations, and most of their advertising elsewhere seems to be just showing me stuff I browsed on Amazon earlier and didn't buy), but if the ad inventory isn't there to really incentivize that sort of targeting, that's the same thing, isn't it?
No kidding. And my fiance was under the impression for a while that it was the cover of what I was reading at the time... She was probably somewhat concerned.
> "I'm not worried about Amazon mining my personal information to start doing better ad targeting."
I get that better ad targeting may not seem like much of an issue at first thought, and may even seem like a benefit, but I'd suggest that the perceived benefits may start to unravel if you consider it from a different point of view.
Companies that are involved in delivering targeted advertising are basing what ads to show you on the profile they're building up about you and what they perceive as similar people to you. The idea being to give you more of what they think you'll like. What this leads to is a filter bubble. When you're in a filter bubble (and I'd argue most of us are), the culture you're exposed to is increasingly limited by your past likes and dislikes, increasingly tailored based on market demographics, far less likely to broaden your range of experience.
We shouldn't welcome the filter bubble, we should act to break out of it, and resisting the mechanisms behind targeted ads is one such way of doing so.
I have an Echo. It's great. To me the Amazon play for this is very straightforward: they want you buying Amazon stuff using it. They don't sell ads, they sell products. When they say that the device only listens for its own name locally, I believe it (sans someone hacking it to spy on people of course, but I don't believe that Amazon deliberately programmed it to do this).
Google is a different story. I imagine that they would try to sell a device that listens 100% of the time and targets ads at you based on what you talk about. Google makes money by selling ads, not by making buying stuff convenient. Their incentive is different.
Ideally, I'd love for Apple to create such a device, but it won't be open, would cost an arm and a leg, and would probably use Siri, which lags behind the Echo in what it can do by quite a bit now.
Amazon does sell ads, actually. A quick search would have shown you this[0], and they show up for Kindle users, on www.amazon.com, and elsewhere. It is highly likely Echo will be involved at some point.
I think the rest of your post is conjecture, but does this change your opinion? Amazon is a diverse business that wants to sell many things, including your eyeballs (or ears in the case of Echo) to others via advertising.
First off, this is all my opinion, not absolute truth.
Second, sure Amazon does ads on the side, but the majority of their money is made by selling their own products. Occam's Razor suggests that they simply want to sell you stuff using one more way. Notice that the Echo didn't do almost anything when it was initially released, except allowing you to buy stuff. That was the part that they worked out before launching it.
Also, don't forget that Amazon also has a number of other devices that are very similar: the Dash button and Amazon Fresh come to mind. The Echo fits nicely in line with it.
I am not saying they couldn't use it for something nefarious: they could definitely abuse it. I just think that they have less incentive to do so than Google.
Sure, some people are worried. But these devices only listen when they hear the wake word ("Ok Google" or "Alexa"), so there's no real concern about the companies listening to anything other than your queries. And 99% of people are not interesting enough for a state actor to care about. If you are a spy, criminal, politician, etc., then I'd agree you should think twice about owning one.
Google and Amazon are huge companies and would face serious liability for falsely advertising that their devices only listened upon hearing the wake word. Moreover, I'm sure someone out there would analyze the network traffic and figure out it did not work as claimed. They have nothing to gain by secretly transmitting data, and everything to lose.
State adversaries are a different story. I don't doubt the NSA might somehow break into Snowden's Echo, but most people don't have such adversaries.
I think it would be entirely possible within US legal framework for Echo/Home to be able to selectively switch from "wake word" to "always listening" mode, on the whim of Amazon/Google or a request of the government. Now, if the government isn't stupid about it and would use it selectively, then good luck tracking it down.
You know what I would want my phone to be doing? To be actually always listening. So that I could just say "Ok Google" at random and interact with Google Now without having to unlock the phone or have it constantly hooked up to a charger. That very simple thing would probably quadruple the usefulness of the whole thing. But Google probably has some "smart" reason for never ever allowing that. sigh
(I mean, what the hell - deep in the options of Google Now I can actually allow the phone to be unlocked by my voice - but if and only if it is plugged to a charger. They had to explicitly code in a special condition to make Google Now less useful.)
(and yes, I know you meant other kind of "always listening")
FYI, some phones actually have this (the Nexus 6 for example). IIRC, not all phones are always listening because of battery concerns, but some phones have chips specifically for listening to "hot words"
Is no one worried at all?