this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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On the highest level, they have a constant firehose of as much audio data from a sea of customers as they wish.
Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.
Have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns.
Know when different customers are home or not, improving demographics data.
Know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach, brand awareness, and better advertisement targeting.
It's not a direct data to money pipeline, but having an always on listening device in someone's home nets you a ton of useful data as an online retailer and advertiser.
They very explicitly do not collect audio when you haven't used a wake word or activated it some other way. They will not "know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach" (which is pretty much the only valuable data you've mentioned here), nor will they "have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns" unless you actively discuss it with your device.
I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but if whoever reads this is thinking of replying "are you going to trust that" etc, yes I am. We can track which data an Alexa transmits in real time and directly verify this "always listening" isn't happening. Even if we couldn't independently verify that his is the case, and lets say they contradict their privacy policy and public statements and do it anyway, that's a crazy liability nightmare. Amazon has more than enough lawyers to know that unconsentually recording someone and using that data is very illegal in most places, and would open them up to so many lawsuits if they accidentally leaked or mishandled the data. Take the conspiracy hat off and put your thinking cap on.
Bad for privacy, but also not a $25 billion dollar source of revenue.
Alexa, Google Home, and Siri devices are not good sources of data. If they were, why would Google, king of kings when it comes to data collection, be cutting their Assistant teams so much?
No company blows 25 billion on purpose without a reason
It's a good thing their reason is explained very clearly in the article linked in this post. They believed Alexa would have a high "downstream impact", i.e.generate sales or subscriptions elsewhere in the company. Which it has so far failed to do.
Amazon wants the loss to avoid paying taxes. They would never admit it is doing well collecting data.
Can you explain to me exactly how moving where profit is recorded from one division to another in the same organization reduces their tax burden? Because, excuse me, I know I only did a year or two of accounting courses before dropping the degree, but that's not how I understand taxes to work.
Also to be turning a profit by "doing well collecting data", the open market value of the data Alexa alone annually generates would need to be around 8% of the entire global data market. If you can justify how millions of instances of "Alexa set a timer for 10 minutes", "Alexa what is the weather", or "Alexa play despacito" generates that much value, maybe you have a point.
“Excuse me”
You seem pretty agitated, and I don’t want to engage with you if you’re going to be impolite.
Yeah well, apologies for being a little sassy, but I'm not exactly a big fan of your tone either.
Read it in a polite tone.
You used polite words, but you were condescending. I'm not interested in whether that was intentional or not, but that is the vibe you gave.
It’s the vibe you put on it. Not the intended vibe. Not everyone is trying to start shit.
As I said, I don't care if you "intended" to be condescending, I'm saying you were. Judging by your comment history you often are, so maybe get used to people responding with a bit of attitude.
Don’t judge a book by its comment history. You should block me, so we don’t have to interact again. I will do the same. I wish you well.