> The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away t

> The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people. Right, yep, I absolutely whole-heartedly 100% agree - hence why I am critical of this technology at every reasonable juncture. I was presenting this as a counter-argument to the argument I mistakenly thought you were making (that voice control is not a successful product because it involves privacy-invasion), not as a justification of the technology itself. > And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said. Ah, fair. I'll gladly agree to that! Alexa is not meaningfully distinguished from Google Home or Siri, so it can't really be said to be a game-changer; ditto for Prime Video and Netflix/D+, etc; and I do agree with you that Prime Go is, at best, a marginal progression on the current state of affairs (I do think that "not needing to employ checkout people" is probably massively impactful from a business-process perspective, but from a customers' perspective, not really much different from a self-checkout) Thank you for a respectful and illuminating exchange - this is why HN remains the only social site that I feel good about using :D