#alexa

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

Akira knocked on the Lightwood apartment as soon as he got there. He was dressed for the pool, just an A-shirt and his swimntrunks. He also had a backpack with him that had a towel and several bags of snacks. He hoped for a good time at least...as well as clarity in their relationship. Or at least he hoped there was clarity to see how they could move on.

Don't know who needs to hear this, but given the current political situation in the United States, unless you are literally a digital security specialist, you NEED to be assuming that the federal government, the police, ICE, the NSA, the FBI, and the tech corporations that work with the government can all easily find, view, and attach to your IRL life:

Everything single message or thing you've ever sent that requires a signal or wifi (aka all of your texts, dms, discord servers, emails, the contents of photo or file attachments, etc.)

Every single post you've ever made on any social media platform, including tumblr, yes, even if your profile is completely anonymous

If you use Google and/or Google Chrome, your entire search history and every single website you've ever been to (and even if you don't use Google Chrome, unless you have a bunch of adblockers and tracker blockers, they will have all of this stuff anyway)

Any online petitions you've signed that were not specifically anonymous, and some that were

Any online donation you made

All the photos in your phone camera roll and/or that you've uploaded to the internet

The precise, real-time location and location history of your cell phone, yes often even if you have your location turned off, and yes, this IS usually just a literal, real-time log of all your movements

The precise, real-time location and location history of any car with Carplay, or likely any car with a built-in GPS

The precise, real-time location of - and the info picked up by - your FitBit or any other wearable health or fitness tracker

Anything you say in sound range of an Amazon Echo or other digital/home assistant

Anything you say or type into Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or any other digital assistant

The live and old footage of every single Ring camera (which ICE now has access to via a partnership between Amazon and surveillance database Flock, yes including the one on your own house, if you have one, and including the ones on your neighbor's house)

The live and old footage of every single security camera connected to the internet, plus any owned by a collaborating corporation (combined, this will be almost all of them)

Every app you have downloaded, and often everything entered into them, including and especially PERIOD TRACKERS (which have already been used to convict multiple ppl of an abortion in states where it is illegal. FB messages about finding an abortion clinic have been used to convict too

Every single thing you've ever entered into an AI, such as ChatGPT, even if you've deleted the logs, which ChatGPT and afaik other AI companies are required to retain indefinitely by court order

Anyway if you don't want the cops potentially seeing it and using it to convict you, don't send it over an unencrypted connection, period

And finally: