Privacy, or a lack of it rather, has become a huge concern in the modern high-tech life ruled by a multitude of devices, services and social media where we easily and readily give away our data and personal information for anyone to take advantage of.
If you'd asked a person from just two decades ago whether they would be willing to do this, they would have probably laughed at your face and dismissed you as a crazy person, but we all know how the sentiments have shifted and we are doing exactly that.
The controversies surrounding Facebook in the recent years have really made it clear that corporate giants simply cannot be trusted with our data and we should assume that whatever we put online can and will be used in one way or the other to line up the pockets of people with vested interests.
People are getting more and more aware of this now but what is disappointing is that most people still don't care even with this knowledge. What's worse is that the ways we are losing our privacy are only increasing and getting more sophisticated.
Smart Speakers - Invaders of Privacy
Smart speakers are slowly but surely transitioning from being niche products to mainstream ones. Offerings like Amazon's Echo, Apple's Homepod, Google's Google Home, not only provide a great way to listen to good quality music but also do a lot of the tasks that we're habituated to do on our phones. All hands free.
This omnipresent and ubiquitous computing is being touted as the future of computing where computing devices will sort of be everywhere and each one will be equally equipped to handle any of our requests. It can be argued that smart speakers are a way to prepare us all for that era of computing.
That's all fine and dandy but once again, this will lead us to sacrificing privacy for convenience. Having products with microphones everywhere that are constantly listening and waiting for our commands, can lead to huge breaches of privacy, not only by hackers but also by the very companies that make those products.
Amazon has been under fire a lot recently for their Echo speakers breaching users' privacy. In one instance, the speaker secretly recorded private conversation of a woman and then sent it to a random contact. Another report came out recently that stated that Amazon employees people who listen to Alexa conversations to make it better.
Although they do not know the identity behind those people, the idea that your conversations with your virtual assistant are actively listened by someone somewhere might be a little unsettling at the least.
The main idea is that we have to trust these corporations that they do not use everything the speakers hear and collect for their own profit, like selling the information to advertisers or building a database of people and profiling them in every way possible.