Alexa?

Introduction

Today in a works teams call, the person I called told their Alexa device to do something and my Amazon Kindle which has ALexa on jumped into life for some reason. The person was telling Alexa to stop, so I don't know what mine was doing.

So Alexa?

Often we will chat about things and then we start getting adverts on our phones and devices about the things that we have been talking about, but our devices are not spying on us, are they? No way, not at all.

Machine manufacturers will blame software manufacturers and will blame machine manufacturers in an everlasting game of blame tennis, but whoever is to blame the user and the customer is the target.

There are endless conversations and arguments about whether this is legal or not.

In a recent episode of "Elementary" someone hat tampered with software that was listening to sounds when gunshots were fired in areas of New York. Sherlock asked how they would know when to record, and the system owners said that the system was always listening, but if there were no gunshots then the recordings were deleted.

Given that the recordings recorded conversations, Sherlock posited that the could easily be used for nefarious purposes but the owners said that would never happen, but, of course, in this episode, it did do.

And that brings me back to our devices.

Things like Alexa, Google Assistant, Mycroft and then the software on our phones and tablets all listen to us waiting for a question or command. The thing is taking what Sherlock said these devices must always be listening and are connected to whoever runs them, so could be feeding back everything to their masters.

We have these devices for convenience, and when we say "Alexa what time is it" and Alexa answers, it has been waiting for that question since it was told to shut down yesterday. But when it was told to cease doing what it was doing it still had to keep listening in case someone asked it something, and if it is listening then it could be recording.

Sorry if I sound like some conspiracy nut with this, but I have had run-ins with Google, Amazon, Facebook and more when their systems have got something wrong, possibly based on it listening when it shouldn't have been.

The thing is we have become very reliant on our devices. I used to know lots of phone numbers, but now I think I only know my mobile number, thats it, because all my numbers and email addresses are stored in the cloud, not even on my phone's SIM or my home computer.

Someone once told me I was open to my identity being cloned because I shared my name and phone number in an email, but my bank has all my details, and lots of other organisations, like power companies, the council and the Inland Revenue and I have to trust that they will keep my details safe.

Conclusion

We use these devices and give out our data for one thing, convenience. For that convenience, we give up chunks of our privacy. If you have a loyalty card, you may get extras like free coffee or whatever but the price of that is that data that you are allowing the loyalty card owner to harvest so they can target you with advertisements to prize more money out of you.

We buy goods online but everything you buy is being tracked and you will see adverts based on the things you buy.

So remember when you tell Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri to stop, it doesn't.