Not too long ago, U.S Senator Chris Coon sent a letter of inquiry to Amazon in order to figure out if Alexa does indeed delete the voice recordings of its clients or if it keeps them forever.
The surprising part is that Amazon did answer to that inquiry letter (while other companies certainly would’ve tried to dodge it) and they did so quite honestly I might add.
The not-so-surprising part is that they confirmed what everyone knew all along… Or should we keep pretending that this all one big conspiracy theory?
I’m afraid that ship has sailed a long time ago. In fact, that ship has sailed, did a tour around the world, returned to port and docked, the passengers left the boat, even Elvis was among them... After that he went to the building, left the building, died a long time ago, people started impersonating him all over the globe, and now even his impersonators have died of old age… So can we please stop with that “conspiracy theory” nonsense?
Big Brother stopped being a conspiracy theory ages ago, did it not?
So yes, Amazon confirmed what everybody knew anyways. That even when you try to delete your private conversations, there is no real option for you to do that.
Those messages - basically everything that you say in the privacy of your home - are stored forever, not to mention being shared with third parties.
The problem here isn’t just Alexa spying on you, but rather the normalization of something that not too long ago seemed like a terrifying possibility.
Now it’s Alexa, next year maybe it’s your TV or your fridge recording your every word, and from there who knows if someday it’ll be virtually impossible to escape this surveillance web.
The strangest part of all is that we’re just taking a page out of one of the worst chapters of history (Stasi, KGB...etc) and pretend that it’s a new cool thing we’re discovering.
I guess that Einstein was right, time is a flat circle.