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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.
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.
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 do not want a friggin' relationship with my machinery.
Just because you're paying doesn't mean you're a customer. Especially if someone else is paying more.
For reference, see politics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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...
"That doesn't sound like something I'd buy, now does it?"
"Buy now" accepted.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
The problems with advertising started after the second world war, when advertisers started adopting techniques developed for propaganda. Lots of people will tell you that adverts have no effect on them, but ask them to name three brands of toothpaste and I can guarantee that they'll all be ones that they've seen adverts for, that they'll buy one of the first three that pops into their heads, and that they won't be able to cite a single clinical study that tells them that it's better than (or even as good as) any other one.
This got far worse with modern Internet advertising. Broadcast adverts (billboards, TV, Radio, and so on) had to work with an average psychological profile, but companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon can collect enough information about individuals to put them into one of a hundred or a thousand far more accurate buckets so that adverts can be tailored directly to manipulate them.
These days, advertising is basically evil. The days when an advert was telling you about a product and giving you information to make an informed decision are long gone.
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