Over the last month many of you may have heard about Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, randomly laughing at its owners. While Amazon has since taken steps to fix the malfunction, the instance still leaves an unsettling feeling.
Amazon seems have made a lot of strides in technology advances in the past year or so, from Alexa, to Amazon Go and their newest endeavor: the Amazon Key, Ring developed doorbell.
Let’s review these Amazon endeavours. You may remember from a previous Clarion article, that Amazon opened the first cashierless store. The whole store is equipped with cameras, computer vision and machine learning software, developed by Amazon. This technologies tracks you throughout the store and records what you walk out with, automatically charging your Amazon.com account.
Great idea right? Maybe for some people. No cashiers and no lines, that sounds great. But let’s not forget how Amazon achieved this; a technology that so so intune with your every move that it can not only track you through the entire store, but identify exactly where and what you pick up and put down, what items you walk out with, and therefore purchase.
Recently Amazon also purchased the Ring doorbell, as part of their goal to create the smart home. The Amazon Key is an effort to make package delivery smoother when customers are not home to sign for and received their purchases. The Key works as a tag team with Amazon’s other new technology; the Cloud Cam.
When a courier arrives at your door and the customer is not home, they scan the package barcode which sends a request to the Amazon cloud which searches to insure it is the correct package location. If everything looks good the cloud sends a message to the Cloud Cam, which starts recording and the courier received a notification on their mobile app.
With a simple swipe on their app the door unlocks, the currier places the package inside your home, and then they leave and re-lock the door with another swipe. The system finally sends a notification and the recorded video of the delivery, to the owner.
This raises quite a few concerns; what if the currier forgets to lock the door behind them? What if you own a dog, that inevitable will be startled by random stranger entering their home while their human is gone. Finally, the thought of someone, let alone a stranger, having that easy of an access to a home is unnerving.
Now, let’s talk about Alexa. By far one of Amazon’s most popular technology endeavours, and their most disturbing. Many of you probably heard about about Alexa randomly laughing at her it’s owners, listing the names of cemeteries and funeral homes or simply refusing to respond to commands. But did you know an Echo speaker controlled by Alexa recorded key evidence for a murder case?
Back in spring of 2017 Alexa recorded key information that it’s owner, the suspect, approved being turned over as evidence in the case. The terrifying part about this is that Alexa is always listening.
Alexa is activated by hearing its name, so logic suggests that in order to hear its name Alexa has to always be listening for it.
Amazon has certainly made impressive strides in the world of technology, don’t get me wrong. It ultimately feels like reading news clippings straight out of futuristic Sci-Fi novels. But what kind of future is that? What’s the next step for Amazon? Baby Skynet?
Cerridwyn Kuykendall
Associate Editor