Today in "What's Amazon Doing to Steal your Privacy"
Discover more from Technically Private
Today in "What's Amazon Doing to Steal your Privacy"
Post from the Past
Hi, here’s a post I wrote in December 2021, which I’ll share with this newsletter to preserve continuity.
Somewhat recently, Amazon put out Echo Frames, seemingly around end of October, which is a Google Glass that interacts through audio. Here's their info page. They, like all Amazon devices are incredibly privacy-secure \s.
Privacy—by design
As with all Echo devices, Echo Frames are designed and built with privacy at the foundation. The microphones are made to respond to the voice of the person wearing the frames and can easily be turned off with a quick double-press of the action button. When the microphones are off, the light indicator will turn red for peace of mind. You can also review your voice history through the Alexa app or Alexa Privacy Hub on demand.
Their post here makes me think about Blade-Runner 2049, where they represent a capitalistic dystopian future by having ads everywhere, like this scene where with AR ads for a ballerina show:
You can see similar, but different, content in Black Mirror and Altered Carbon.
Amazon moving into the wearables space made me think that Bladerunner does not show us what the future holds, where advertising is passive and you interact with the world to be advertised to. Instead, it's going to be highly personal and active - Amazon (google, apple, whoever) will track you, and provide you with new content to shape your decisions. The way that companies (right now) pay Pokemon-Go to send real people to physically go to a store/location, as part of the game.