Looks like “yup.”
Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
What’s particularly interesting is that Amazon employees aren’t just listening to you when you’re specifically engaged with Alexa… but just *whenever.* It’s ALWAYS ON. The people at Amazon have recordings of people singing in the shower, children screaming and, apparently, a sexual assault. Which they heard live but did nothing about.
When I was a kid in the Before Times when there was no Alexa, no YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and all the rest, people thought of their privacy as inviolate. “1984” included TVs that transmitted video of *you* to the government intelligence services, and we all shuddered at the idea. Now people livestream everything they do. People livestream themselves driving to work, eating their meals, doing the hunka-chunka, getting shooty at the local Mosqueateria. They share photos of their meals, their children, their vacations. People have effectively given away their privacy, but on their terms. Now we have intelligence gathering machines within our homes, and we *know* that these things are broadcasting what we do to strangers.
On one hand… creepy. On the other hand… this could have major influences on society. When I was seeking a security clearance going on 20 years ago, the FBI researched me up one side and down the other, looking for embarrassing stuff. Not – presumably – to hold over me, but to see if I had anything that somebody else might hold over me. If it turned out that I had some freaky weird preversion, the Russians or Chinese or somebody could theoretically find out about it and use that knowledge to blackmail me into providing them secrets. But let’s say that, rather than two decades ago, it was *today.* If I did indeed have freaky weird preversions… hell I might have my own for-profit webcam site. Rather than being embarrassed to the point of being blackmailed, I might try to sell a subscription to the service to the investigating FBI agent.
And so perhaps the fact that you have a device that gives you some small measure of convenience while utterly erasing traditional notions of privacy might become completely accepted. We do indeed live in Clown World, so maybe what seemed creepy as hell to me will be seen as perfectly normal and nothing to bother about.