The wiretap Alexa

Echo the loudspeaker and its AI Alexa learn everything about their customers - really everything. Customers become transparent and even pay for it.

The German newspaper "Die Zeit" writes about their product testing:

We have talked to the virtual assistant Alexa and this Amazon device changes our everyday life in a radical way.

Echo is nice to look at, black and is able to speak. So much for the positive aspects of this test.

The problem: The whole concept is a data privacy hell. Echo is the wiretap from IM Alexa and Amazon the commercial state security service that is spying at us as deep as it can. The device should work as an intelligent assistant like an interface and as a gateway to the internet. That's why microphones are permanently listening to everything. Everything we say. This is the only way the device can work properly. Thereby the Amazon wiretap is able to draw one's conclusions from almost everything that we do.

Mathematical behaviour analysis

A lot of people were tamed into absence of pain regarding how they deal with their data. Therefor nobody cares about the wiretap which is available at the bargain price of about 200$. In the USA Alexa is sold out constantly.

With Echo our behaviour and language is analyzed mathematically, is being mapped and then correlated with data universes on data servers, just to make customers be able to order despicable things via voice control or ask how the weather will be or to be able to dim the lights, because connective devices accept Echo as an interface. With this artificial neuronal networks in the cloud of Amazon the software can learn who we are and how we "work". Alexa expands total surveillance from the virtual room into the most holy - our living room.

At the moment Amazon knows when we are at home, if we are alone, if we slender about the president, whom we are going to elect, if we are singing left radical paroles or hit songs while we take a shower or if we have peculiar sexual interests. Not in a metaphorical sense but rather literally. After a short period of time users of Echo won't be aware of the machine recording from now on til eternity.

Profiles from everyone

The access to our speech patterns alone gives Alexa and the monstrous technological infrastructure to which it is connected remotely, the ability of a sinister exact psychological profiling. Whole branches of businesses that use artificial intelligence like Amazon have specialized on doing this. In the USA profiles of every resident exist in a way that the German Stasi would have been dreaming of. Cambridge Analytica is a company selling this kind of data and Echo trains the software with our speech and behaviour patterns for the analysis of our personality.

Users of Echo won't only pay for a gadget forking out their data which at the moment is trading under the name asset - much more: They train the self learning software for free, which more and more becomes the core of all business fields in the IT oligarchy. And it's not just about speech recognition. Thousands of users feed the Echo system with human privacy. With models made thereof, simulations about buying decisions can be played through, behavioral patterns can be calculated and advertising can be optimized.

In the best case this makes our life easier, because we got that books recommended which we really like. But if it goes badly we are not allowed to enter the USA any more, because our profiling is showing patterns of danger. Own-occupation disability insurance is denied, because the software anticipates a depression which it is never going to tell us.

Echo is the "fancy" pioneer finishing our privacy in a commercial way.

Finally a bit about history: It leads us back into the year 2003. Those days the scientific office of the Pentagon (DARPA) announced the project "Calo". Calo stands for "Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes". The military was working on a - much more inefficient - artificial intelligence, which permanently gathered data from its users and should have been able to learn. Calo belongs to the superior program "Personalized Assistant that Learns" (PAL) of the military on which regarding to the New York Times about hundred military institutions, scientists were working for about five years. After completion Apple bought the system in the year of 2008 and named it "Siri" - the mobile predecessor of Alexa.