Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Your Amazon Echo Is an Ad Machine (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: CNBC reports that Amazon is in discussions with huge companies that want to promote their goods on Echo devices. Proctor & Gamble as well as Clorox are reportedly in talks for major advertising deals that would allow Alexa to suggest products for you to buy. CNBC uses the example of asking Alexa how to remove a stain, with Alexa in turn recommending a Clorox product. So far it's unclear how Amazon would identify promoted responses from Alexa, if at all. Here's the really wacky thing: Amazon has already been doing this sort of thing to some degree. Currently, paid promotions are built into Alexa responses, but maybe you just haven't noticed it. CNBC uses this example: "There are already some sponsorships on Alexa that aren't tied to a user's history. If a shopper asks Alexa to buy toothpaste, one response is, 'Okay, I can look for a brand, like Colgate. What would you like?'" So it seems like Amazon wants to get you coming and going. Not only does the company want to let you buy stuff with your voice. Jeff Bezos and friends also want to make money by suggesting what to buy and even by pushing those products higher up in the search results so that you're more likely to do it.
No. Frelling. Way.
That can't possibly be true. Biased suggestions? An attempt to sell stuff from a company that, well, sells stuff? No! I am verily astonished!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Now your Echo can tell you what to drink when you ask it the same dumb question for the millionth time.
#noshitsherlock
Itâ(TM)s amazons device in your home. You may technically own the metal and plastic but the guts of that system are amazons spy and consumption portal. Read the Eula.
In amazons America, Alexa owns YOU!
If you can make new 'skills' for Amazon's gadget which result in more ads being delivered to users, Amazon will pay you
https://www.techspot.com/news/72465-here-what-people-behind-alexa-skills-get-paid.html
Everything from Amazon, Google, Facebook, is ad-related
You are not their customers, you are their product
Alexa, GET OUT OF TOWN
But I could never understand why *I* should pay *them* for it. It always seemed that it should be the other way around....
These devices are true "Trojan Horses". You invite them into your home, and they inevitably start sucking money through their channels for items you normally would buy at a bricks-and-mortar store. Dog food, tissues, a pizza, whatever. Sooner or later you will buy something from the small value category that Amazon (a merchandising company) or Google (an advertising company) don't normally sell in significant volume, or can't sell through their normal commerce channels due to perishability. If you're a retailer and you're not part of these ecosystems, your bottom line will be declining as of today.
I don't think advertising is inherently evil. If you want to sell something, you have got to get the word out somehow. It's how commerce works. It is part of the circulatory system of our economy.
It's a problem when it's overdone. Pushing it into products you have already purchased, is overdoing it. But all the major players are doing this, because there is money behind it and because they can. The market as a whole puts up with it, so they get away with it.
I don't like it. So I don't have an Alexa. Even if they gave me one for free I wouldn't take it; the thought of Jeff listening in on me at all hours of the day really creeps me out.
I'd pay for a true digital assistant; designed to meet my needs and not the needs of the vendor's business partners. The tech isn't quite there yet. The business might never be.
Need I say more.
Do most people use it for shopping? I tried it a couple times, but seems inconvenient since I rarely re-order the same item twice, so I can't say "Alexa, re-order toothpaste" -- I generally want to browse around and read reviews and look at prices from non-prime shippers.
The only thing I use my Echo for is listening to music, turning the lights off, and sometimes the weather. Oh and and a kitchen timer.
If it starts playing ads for any of those uses, I'll stop using it.
>Jeff Bezos and friends
I love how people like to personify leadership roles like the president of a country or the CEO of a company so that there is a clear, well defined figure to shit on.
>INSIDERS REPORT THAT BEZOS AND FRIENDS EXPLICITLY GAVE ORDERS TO AMAZON MARKETING DIRECTORS TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY!
I wonder which brands of “titty chips” and “smelly tampon boogers” can Alexa add to my shopping list?
Bannon sucked Cernovich's cock.
I have pics.
... is smart enough to not give me ads.
Well, not counting ads that everyone else listening to the same radio station is getting.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Aaaaand just like that any and all of my interest in this product has disappeared.
A personal assistant isn't if he serves more than one master. In the real world, we call that treason and cut their heads off. Well, in recent centuries we fire them instead, but same idea.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I was an early Echo adopter and have a Dot now as well. I primarily use it to (a) maintain my shopping/errands list, and (b) stream music while I do stuff in the kitchen. I've never bought anything using it.
But I can tell you if the day comes that Alexa gives me ads when I'm asking for something else, it's getting unplugged forever. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Uh yes, I have this blue dress... and well, you know, things kinda got a bit out of hand...
Does OxiClean work?
I have a whiteboard for (a), a cheap linux laptop for (b)
Someone catch me I may faint!
I do not want a friggin' relationship with my machinery.
It absolutely astounds me that people not only pay money to be advertised to, they actually enjoy it, and prefer it.
Is humanity that far gone that we've been hypnotized into buying shit we don't need and we pay for the right to do so?
Amazing. Aliens visiting our planet in the future will see a Matrix-like world come to fruition, soon enough.
If people are bound and determined to act like sheep, we shouldn't be terribly surprised when corporations treat them like sheep.
What's really disappointing, though, is that so many have come to believe they actually deserve this, and vote in ways that facilitate their further victimization.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Alexa starts reading the Washington Post.
and the next step will be a government mandated 'terminal' in every home. Then in every room.
Orwell must be turning in his grave over how many of the plebs are sleepwalking towards the state he predicted. The CEO's and Marketeers will all be for this. They will make their dosh and escape before the going gets too bad. I hear Antartica is the place to hide out at the moment.
Fuck the lot of them.
I'll never have any of this crap in my home.
Did you miss the mobile advertising company that listens in on the TV adverts you're watching while you have a phone, to to target adverts? Alphonso ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-app-tracking.html
At least that's what Alphonso claims is the limit of its listening in, once they have the data, what their computers do with it is black-box. You have no idea what they're doing with that, and its very very very unlikely to be simply listening into the adverts on TV because to filter for just TV adverts would be hard, and to run voice recognition and music recognition algorithms against that data would be relatively easy.
Notice the lack of outrage from privacy minded governments? These games are used, the game mid-way asks you to turn on the mic, and starts listening into the daily lives. Kids, adults, they don't care, it's all data to be sold and analysed.
screwing with them?
Pay cash for your Amzon spy device.
Link it to a pre-paid credit card.
Create a fake Amazon account.
Create a tape loop of random words.
Entertainment...
This isn't 1984 kid that dream wont become reality if people feel that these devices are pushing their limits they will simply stop using them.
Put the tinfoil away!
Most people have higher limits than you'd think. "If I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care about privacy?" The mating cry of the millennial sheep.
I'll make a fortune of my soon to be existing Alexa ad-blocking skill.
...how...Amazon...works!!!
I really thought the whole fuss about these things all joining up and selling you stuff was overblown, until one day at work...
I work in a university biochemistry department, where we do X-ray crystallography. We have a home X-ray source downstairs, which we're talking about upgrading. (No, Alexa, we're not buying it off Amazon, STFU.) My professor is interested in a system that uses liquid gallium for the anode, as opposed to the traditional spinning lump of copper. We've talked about it, a lot, phones nearby. Nothing weird has ever happened as a result.
Then we had a meeting with the nice lady from the Innovations department - the one where they deal with all the patents and fun secret stuff. My boss, being a wonderful old-school professor, just had to tell her in detail about this device, even though it was only vaguely related to what we were meant to be discussing. Her iPhone sat innocently on the table the whole time.
Not two hours later, I went to Amazon to buy some kayaking stuff. Top of my recommendations? 20 grams of gallium. Never had anything even vaguely like it recommended, before or since.
Could be blind coincidence, of course...
"Alexa, do what I say and shut the fuck up"
(and yes, I know I go to feminist hell for that one)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hate to burst your bubble but that argument is by no means championed by millenials. In fact, whenever our rights get carved up again, it's usually the baby boomers I hear spouting that hogwash. Less so gen x.
Then again hating on millenials is so much easier than confronting one's own failings...
If they still may, yes, they will.
At what point will acceptance be high enough that you'd already raise suspicion by not inviting the trojan horse into your home? And at what point will you pretty much become a social pariah if you don't?
We already see something like this happen with Facebook. Quite a few companies already don't really have their own homepages anymore. You want to deal with them, you have questions, you have complaints? Better have a Facebook account or you won't. Any promotion will also only happen with Facebook, and by now you also already have webpages that require you to have an account there to log in to them because they want to avoid the hassle of having to deal with their own user database.
And of course if most people you know use Facebook to organize events, guess what you'll have to have to be invited, because it's so comfortable and hassle free to create a group and just invite all the people on the list?
It reminds me more and more of the former East Bloc. A lot of things were not outright outlawed or mandated, but failing to do what The Party wanted usually resulted in you miraculously being sidelined.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well then just get rid off it now because it's only a matter of time.
i use post-its
people are way too autistic about their shopping lists it seems
Sounds like Amazon should give the Echo away for free.
Amazon Echo, Siri, Google, etc. is Mycroft. I'm not sure if it's quite mature yet, but they are making leaps and bounds: https://mycroft.ai/
So much for good advice, itâ(TM)s more advice from the highest paid advertisers. Go figure coming from Amazon. Isnâ(TM)t Amazon and Google synomonous for ads,ads,ads.
But I could never understand why *I* should pay *them* for it. It always seemed that it should be the other way around....
That's because the internet ad-driven revenue model has ruined everything. People are so used now to get a "free" service (e.g. Gmail, Youtube, whatever) in exchange for being subjected to a barrage of advertising (and giving up their personal data to the provider of the service) that this is now becoming commonplace in services and products you actually pay upfront for, in real currency. People are so used to ads everywhere that they just ignore it, and the distinction is lost on them. So I pay $100 for a Windows licence and get advertising on my login screen. I buy Google Home or Amazon Echo and then get ads inserted as "suggestions" (they don't even say they're ads anymore). Soon you'll be buying cars that'll have an LCD screen on each door flashing commercials streamed there by the manufacturer, and you won't have any say in the matter.
I'm sorry, but exactly who is surprised by this? Amazon is in the business of selling shit. Their digital assistant is really only a gateway to selling you shit, collecting your information, and figuring out how to sell you more shit.
The sad reality is, these digital assistants are being sold by ad companies. Welcome to the awesome future, where all of the cool technology is in the service of a mega-corporation and not you.
Why am I suddenly thinking the first rule of robotics will have morphed into "unless it cuts into the profits of Amazon".
Didn't want one of these things before, still don't want one. Because, really, this was pretty much self evident from the start.
No thanks, I don't need a personal marketing assistant whose job it is to collect my information for its corporate overlords. Anybody who didn't think this was what was happening is an idiot.
It'd be interesting to see how many /.er's actually own one.
Yes but I always forget to pack the whiteboard in the morning so if I decide to stop at the supermarket on my way home, I know what to get....
bickerdyke
Go and sit in the out-patients waiting area at your nearest hospital for a day. You will start to wonder why so many people are presenting there with problems that could have been prevented with a little foresight, a little better knowledge of hygiene practices they could have been following or dietary decisions they could have made, but no, that is not how the average person works. They were directed by the media services which make up a large percentage of their 'information' input, and they did what they were told to do. And they paid their hard-earned money for shit that didn't make them healthy, shit that didn't protect them from contagions, and shit that just outright did them harm. You might think you are too smart to let this happen to you, but you can't apply that to the masses, shit just doesn't work that way.
Baaaaaaaaaah!
Anyone who buys that crap deserves everything they throw at them
It's called a brain, with a memory. Some of us were born with one.
I just use my short term memory for shopping lists etc. Might be unfashionable but it serves me well. Probably helps stave of dementia and keeps me mentally active too.
Hell, Stevie Wonder could see this coming...
This is the number one thing that comes to mind when someone tells someone else what Alexa is. That it's a semi-hostile device is what you think about, even before someone mentions that it also has some kind of useful application for the user. I am pretty sure that 100% of the people who buy this device, are ok with the fact that its primary purpose is to manipulate how the shop. (Holy crap, look at who makes and sells it.) They all know they're buying an ad machine, but they think its other qualities will somehow outweigh that downsides.
And some of us prefer to use it for more interesting things.
bickerdyke
You know, I find this terribly amusing.
Because, quite frankly, as someone who immediately said "fuck that" to a device which wants to spy on you, collect information about you, and be a conduit into Amazon ... how the fuck did you not see this coming????
I mean, it was pretty fucking obvious this was always going to happen, and I'm sure buried in the EULA nobody reads is you giving them permission to do exactly this.
I'm kind of shocked to see the tech community suddenly realizing that, yes, this was always intended to run ads and drive revenue to Amazon while collecting your personal information.
You seriously want to invite an always-listening microphone into your home which is linked to a multi-billion dollar corporation who wants nothing more than to monetize your life ... and you're suddenly fucking surprised by this???.
Honestly, the hand-wringing by people who should have known better is pathetic. Do you really think Amazon built this to benefit you and not piggypack a little cash for themselves in that?
Some of us have been pointing this out since day 1, but I presume you fools have been saying "oh noes, Google and Amazon would never spy on me or try to push ads at me". If you didn't see this coming, you're an idiot -- this was 100% predictable, and was in fact predicted by many many people.
Boo hoo, my Amazon ad device is an ad device, and I'm outraged.
My friend recently got a Google Home. It's actually a pretty decent wifi speaker, and among the cheapest as well. Possibly worth buying and disabling the microphone.
You know, I totally understand when people imagine these things and then say "eww, that would suck!" I'm totally with you on that, without resevations.
Where people lose me, is when they seriously predict it will actually happen. How do people make that leap?
You know, right, that government hasn't mandated anything like that and isn't going to, right? They don't even need to anyway, because so many people willingly opt into doing it to themselves. (e.g. Phones are very popular.)
Of course. What I don't get is: why do you think the government gives the slightest fuck? They're ok with having easy monitoring of 95% of people. They don't look at that like "oh shit, we have to get that last 5%." It's more like "we need to get better exploiting this nearly free 95% that we're not currently doing nearly enough with." They have such easier and better-paying work ahead of them, than dealing with fringe outlier cases.
Go read some "dumb criminal" stories. That's where the payoff is: taking advantage of people who trivially give themselves away. They aren't worrying about the people who are having encrypted conversations, for example. They're pissed that lots of people are doing things in plaintext and they don't have enough resources to fully use what's being given to them. You're worrying that they'll find the 8 oz of weed hidden in your car's trunk, and they're pissed that Border Patrol Officer #34 FORGOT to arrest the guy who had a joint sticking out of his shirt pocket, because the fuckwit couldn't use a checklist!
I'm not saying yor imagined dystopia wouldn't suck; I'm saying that from the adversary's point of view, it's unnecessary and inefficient. Understand?
Why use a car to go to work? It's called legs, with muscles. Some of us were born with two.
Yes but I always forget to pack the whiteboard in the morning...
You could snap a photo of it with your cell phone...
My wife and I just take a picture of the board before we head out. We had some list keeping software, shared notebook, and other things, but they're never in the kitchen when we need them. I suppose that shouting at Alexa and hoping she understands is one option, but just jotting a note on the fridge works just fine. As a trade-off for not installing a spying ad delivery system in my house, I say it's a fair compromise.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yep, that's how I get to work most of the time, either that or a bicycle.