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Saint Louis University Is Outfitting Student Living Spaces With Thousands of Echo Dots (techcrunch.com)
Saint Louis University announced this week a plan to outfit living spaces with 2,300 Echo Dots. The smart speakers will be ready by the time classes start later this month. TechCrunch reports: SLU is quick to note that it's "the first college or university in the country to bring Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, managed by Alexa for Business, into every student residence hall room and student apartment on campus." It's certainly not the first to adopt Amazon's smart speakers, but it's among the largest scale for this sort of deployment. While the product has become a mainstay in plenty of American homes, it does seem like an odd choice dorms and student campus. SLU has worked with Alexa for Business to create 100 custom questions, including, "What time does the library close tonight?" and "Where is the registrar's office?"
The company addressed [the privacy concerns] on a privacy page, writing: "Because of our use of the Amazon Alexa for Business (A4B) platform, your Echo Dot is managed by a central system dedicated to SLU. This system is not tied to individual accounts and does not maintain any personal information for any of our users, so all use currently is anonymous. Additionally, neither Alexa nor the Alexa for Business management system maintains recordings of any questions that are asked."
The company addressed [the privacy concerns] on a privacy page, writing: "Because of our use of the Amazon Alexa for Business (A4B) platform, your Echo Dot is managed by a central system dedicated to SLU. This system is not tied to individual accounts and does not maintain any personal information for any of our users, so all use currently is anonymous. Additionally, neither Alexa nor the Alexa for Business management system maintains recordings of any questions that are asked."
Because your government decided to subsidize college education to the tune of 20k+ per student per year in the form of college loans. Colleges that used to cost 5k per year to attend are now 30k per year because the educators know you still have that original 5k + inflation.
Big Data is Watching.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Saint Louis University Is Outfitting Student Living Spaces With Thousands of Surveilance Bugs.
Yeah, I'm not even sure who has access if it's managed by SLU, because SLU very recently fired all or nearly all of their IT staff and outsourced everything to Dell and Microsoft. To my understanding, what local staff remains has experienced significant turnover, and has very little control over anything.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
The school notes that students can also mute the microphone. Students can’t technically opt-out, but they can unplug the product and shove it in a drawer, turning it in at the end of the year. Just don’t use it as a hockey puck, because that’ll cost you.