This will probably not come as a surprise to most people, but if you’ve allowed yourself to forget then today brings a fresh reminder—courtesy of the Bezos-owned Washington Post—that your Alexa speaker is keeping voice files on you.
Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler examined four years of his “Alexa archive” and found that Amazon had voice files of him saying things he and others in his house never intended to discuss with Alexa, like conversations about medications and private business dealings. “You cannot stop Amazon from making these recordings,” he notes, “aside from muting the Echo’s microphone (defeating its main purpose) or unplugging the darned thing.”
And this is just the beginning of the information that Amazon, Google, and other makers of “smart home” devices are collecting about what you say, when you eat, when you feel too cold or too hot, what music you listen to, when you sleep, and when you wake.
Fowler wrote a song about this, and it’s worth listening to while you wait for the next arrival on the Met Gala’s pink carpet:
