THOUGHTS AS VARIOUS NEW ECHO
DEVICES BREAK COVERThe days when Amazon’s Echo smart speaker
was deemed a mere novelty now seem like a
distant memory. At an excitingly packed event in
Seattle, the online-store-turned-tech-company
unveiled a staggeringly large array of new
devices housing the now-iconic voice assistant
Alexa, providing us with a tantalizing insight into
how Alexa could extend its reach far outside the
home. However, as the assistant becomes more
ubiquitous, could familiar issues about privacy
grow in complexity?
PRIVACY CONCERNS
CONTINUE TO LINGERIt’s not that Amazon didn’t acknowledge the
whole issue of privacy as the Seattle event
opened. In August, Bloomberg reported that
Amazon had decided to allow Alexa users
to opt out of their voice recordings being
human-assessed through a program designed
to improve the assistant’s responses. “We’re
investing in privacy across the board,” Dave
Limp, Amazon’s hardware and services chief,
explained in Seattle, scotching the idea of
privacy as an afterthought across Amazon
devices and services.
Limp elaborated that privacy “has to be
foundational and built in from the beginning for
every piece of hardware, software and service
that we create.” To that end, Amazon is now
allowing Alexa users to ask the assistant “Alexa,
tell me what you heard” to learn precisely what it
has recorded. One setting now paves the way for
Alexa to regularly delete old recordings, while