How Private Is Amazon Echo?
The real question is when can you get it in a robot puppy dog form?
Put a microphone in your product, and someone is going to assume you’re listening to them. That’s one of the challenges Amazon Echo - the online retailer’s “Siri in a totem pole” - faces, with suspicion about just how much Jeff Bezos & Co. (or his algorithms, at least) are actually eavesdropping on. Given the power of Amazon’s recommendation engines and the amount of data it gathers just from casual browsing, you can certainly see where some of the paranoia might come from, too. A microphone-mute button takes pride of place on top of Echo, but will it be enough to persuade potential users that the virtual assistant is working for them and not for Amazon itself? I went hunting for some answers on just what Echo shares and how you can tame it.
Amazon bills Echo as your family’s friend: answering the kid’s questions while they do their homework, and keeping a running shopping list for the parents without making them reach for a pen in the kitchen. The concern, though, is just how much listening Echo is doing.