Slashdot Mirror
More Than 8M People Own an Amazon Echo As Customer Awareness Increases 'Dramatically' (geekwire.com)
Amazon continues to see more and more traction with its voice-enabled speaker. An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimates that there are now 8.2 million customers who own an Amazon Echo device, which first went on sale in late 2014 to Prime members and became generally available in June 2015. That's up 60 percent from the 5.1 million Echo users that CIRP cited in November 2016; the big increase likely resulted from a busy holiday season that saw Echo sales spike 9X from the year prior, according to Amazon. The 8.2 million number is also up nearly 3X from this time last year, CIRP said.
It's not really for you,, and It's more likely to be accepted by people than the government forcing everyone to get a telescreen.
Just weird that people would pay to have these in their home. I'd think Amazon would have had to pay people on the order of a hundred bucks or so a month to get some creepy microphone next to their couches.
Don't these people realize that they are opening up their private lives to companies in wholly new ways?
Before you say "The FBI can already listen in on your phone anyway", please understand that this is very different:
- This device has way better microphones, and can listen well across the room.
- With FBI surveillance, if your phone starts listening in it's a rare occasion that you had no choice in. With Alexa it's assumed and accepted that a microphone is always on, and you conciously accept it.
- You are conciouslymaking your visitors susceptible to surveillance.
- It might not store your voice, but they probably store a hashed voice print. This makes you easily recognisable by other Alexa's. It's like Google technically not reading your mail, but finding out lots about you anyway.
- Visitors of your home will now also get a voice hash.
- You are implicitly saying you are ok with a culture where companies have these devices in the home. While that may be ok with you, this culture in the end will create social pressure for others to accept this too.
- It doesn't record everything now to make it more socially acceptible. But it might become a 'feature' later. A beach head like this is asking for feature creep.
- Check out Hellen Nissenbaum's concept of privacy as 'Contextual Integrity' to better understand how this is, in fact, a sufficiently new situation.
- Check outthe book "Black Box Society" to better understand how privacy is about the right to avoid social pressure. Or watch this short interview:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/...
We all understand the old punitive system where a crime leads to a punishment. It's the one lots of people claim they have nothing to hide from..
We are now building a much more subtle system next to that in the form of the reputation economy, where deviant behavior is corrected through social pressure.
A Fad... just like smart phones.
To be honest, I don't expect the home voice assistant in 10 years to resemble the current one much, but it is more than a fad. This isn't like the tablet which was basically an inconvenient hybrid of a smart phone and a laptop- the home assistant like Echo, and Google Home is a new market and is surprisingly useful. Totally unnecessary, but useful.
Now, Voice assistants on your phone or PC... yeah... those are rather useless. Connecting your smart home, light bulbs, etc, to Alexa, that's when it gets rather useful. I use it every single day.
If you're just getting an echo dot for the "meow meow" skill, you'll get bored after driving your cats crazy a few times, but when it actually controls things around your home, that's another story.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is there some payola going on? Google was actually first to implement a voice assistant. Nearly a year before Siri, I was using it on my Android phone to send texts, initiate map navigation, make appointments and to-do lists, make general web queries, as well as make phone calls like most phones have been able to do since the early 2000s. It's just that most people never knew about it because Google never thought to give it a catchy anthropomorphized name like Siri or Alexa.
Approximately 81% of the Android devices out there can use OK Google (Android 4.4 or newer). With 1.4 billion Android devices, that's 1.1 billion devices with access to Android's voice assistant. iOS has about a half billion users, the vast majority of whom can use Siri. Yet the press is saturated with stories about a mere 8.2 million people with an Amazon Echo?
I'm far from poor, nor am I worried about government agencies. I'm a clinical pharmacist and no debt.
First off, IOT adds nothing of value to me. I can get up to turn off the light. I can push the button on my garage door opener. Seconds, I refuse to voluntarily give more information to public corporations, namely Google and Apple.
Only in the US could Amazon be lighting it up with privacy-destroying devices like Echo while "1984" tops their book sales.
I use DuckDuckGo whenever possible, and !bangs when I need to use google. I don't use gmail, nor do I have a google account.
Go searching for your phone? Mine is in my pocket, or on my nightstand. Again, it's more useless crap to supposedly make things more "convenient", when really it's just convincing you to buy more crap that will end up at the Goodwill in a few years.
is it me being paranoid, or is the idea of a semi autonomous machine with a hot mic in the house, ready to broadcast everything you say, something right out of 1984 the novel?