I get the sentiment, but I'm asking why. There's clearly some utility to the device, right? It has some value to some people. What negative outcomes would you expect will happen due to them having that device in their homes? What percentage of Echo owners do you think will end up with regrets about installing the device?
Seeing how 2(?) billion people are using Facebook, it's obvious that most people either don't care or don't understand the implications behind giving away their privacy.
The Echo is a neatly packaged surveillance device that's disguised as a.. What are these things called? Voice assistants?
As with pretty much every IoT device, these things can be broken into by malicious actors and then they get to listen in too.
Next thing on the list is that Amazon can do whatever it wants with those recordings and I highly doubt they're only listening in after you mention certain keywords. More likely that's just the trigger to flip the "answer back" switch.
And last but not least we should not forget about the surveillance agencies, who will get unrestricted access to this one way or another.
In the grand way of things, this is just another method people are letting themselves being monitored. Just another small step towards total authoritarian control by mega-corporations and dictators.
We have to step up and stop this from happening while we still can, or else there won't be any privacy left for anyone of us and the next generation will just grow up with it "being normal".
And before you ask, no, I don't have a smart phone. I have a very dumb phone that I can only use to call someone with or get called myself and more often than not I don't carry it around with me.
As with laws, it is difficult to predict the outcome of misuse or outright abuse of powerful technologies.
The cost here is whatever you can imagine happening if every utterance and the implied judgement of your character escaped into the wild should a keen hacker, nefarious internal actor, or simply a product manager raised by wolves goes ahead "liberates" your data feed. Amazon want to compensate us with, what? ... looks like voice commands and a marginal reduction in search effort, particularly when searching for things they want you to buy from them.
If you assume a villain/nefarious actor is in play, then people have been doing this with mobile phones/tablets/computers/smart TVs for a long time - why do we make such a big distinction between those devices and this one. They're the same thing.
