3 ms·
I think with stuff like this it's easy to assume "evil company stealing your data". And while I'm sure that accidents happen, I also feel like Amazon knows this
by _fat_santa 6y ago
I think with stuff like this it's easy to assume "evil company stealing your data". And while I'm sure that accidents happen, I also feel like Amazon knows this and will go to extreme lengths to protect their users data.
Why? Imagine how much it would cost amazon in lost sales and market cap if some scandal broke about how thier Alexa device were leaking user data. Even a small story would be enough to wipe out millions if not billions of dollars of market cap and sales.
- rcoveson 6y agoYou may be underestimating the costs of _not_ archiving large amounts of potentially-sensitive data in a way that is accessible to a large number of employees (and therefor not very secure). Alexa needs training. Training requires data, as real as possible and as much as possible. It also requires reviewers, and that review process requires a lot of person-hours. So if Amazon were to decide not to store voice recordings of real-world interactions (or potential-interactions like "my friend Alexa said..."), or if they were to decide not to make that data available broadly (to thousands of employees), then they would also be wiping out millions of dollars of market cap. The way I see it, it's not really a question of whether or not they're being cavalier with private data. For me that threshold was crossed with the large human voice-to-text farms. I don't want the list of people who might hear my private conversations that maybe contained syllables sounding like "Alexa" or "Siri" or "Google" to be thousands strong. That's orders of magnitude more than could ever be reasonably expected to constitute a secure circle.