Quote:
Originally Posted by Conan46
I always have some amount of tension weighing privacy with the pragmatic usefulness of Alexa. I use the Bible skill to have Alexa read chapters to me. I also listen to Pandora music. Timers are useful and alarms. TTS readings of ebooks are useful and a few other things. There will be breaches and hacks. The important thing is that Amazon tech and devs find and fix them quickly. My only real concern is that Amazon gets as greedy as Google for our info that they step over the line and collect too much and listen too often and abuse our love for their devices. In that situation I would drop my Alexas as fast as a hot rock no matter how convenient they are. I don't think Amazon is that stupid. But over time Google has actually become evil and I wouldn't have thought it of them either. So I stay very cautiously optimistic as Amazon actually wants to sell us items and hopefully can't afford to scare off their users.
|
I really don't think you have to worry much about Amazon directly abusing your information. I think the huge threat is that they are never going to police the 3rd party apps and Alexa skills the way they should. Google will let developers put almost any app on Android; they are sleazy and could care less if those apps are a threat to users. Amazon is better than Google, but Alexa runs on Android and it is crazy easy to hack Android. Google has definitely shown no restraint in harvesting user informations and selling it to other customers. That is sick. And if you think Amazon isn't peeking at your information and activity, request a song to be played on an Alexa device then go to Amazon.com and you will see advertisements pushing that song and artist front and center! Or google a song or any item, and it appears on Amazon.com the next time you go there. Amazon definitely spies on us to find what things we like and or interested in and then they relentlessly push those items in our face trying to get us to purchase them.