Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere
by Craig Willms
My daughter once bought us an Amazon Dot as a present. I went so far as to set it up but have never actually used it.
I'm sure Alexa is a nice gal, but that's not enough for me to allow her to listen to everything that is said inside my house. When you set up one of these Amazon devices there is an explicit acknowledgement that you are allowing something to listen in on your household awaiting a trigger word. When my wife and I talked about it neither of us were comfortable with this arrangement, and the Dot device found its way to the dead technology drawer. With that we thought we had dealt with the issue of Big Brother monitoring us.
Last week I found it discarded in the drawer. It made me consider something that happened to me recently. Sometime in the past I had said we should get a birdbath to go with our bird feeding station. Once again, my thoughtful daughter must have heard me and on my birthday gave me a beautiful birdbath. Obviously, the word birdbath was spoken in the house several times that day. The very next day as I checked headlines and such on my personal computer, I was treated to ads for birdbaths...
I thought, wow that was random, what are the odds that I would be presented with ads for birdbaths out of the blue like that. I mean really, a birdbath ad is pretty random. Well, OK, the moment passed, and I went on with my life.
Shortly thereafter I was watching a CBS Sunday Morning program with my wife, and they did a bit on the Doobie Brothers 50 years in the rock and roll business. Being a huge DB fan, I watched with rapt attention. Michael McDonald was featured, and I told my wife I had lost all interest in the Doobie Brothers after Michael McDonald joined them. Essentially, they stopped sounding like the Doobie Brothers to me. Nothing against Michael McDonald, but it would be like Barry Manilow joining the Beach Boys.
The next day I was again back on the computer and opened up YouTube. There I was treated to several videos featuring Michael McDonald. I was gob smacked. I had never typed in a browser or a phone anything about the Doobie Brothers or Michael McDonald that would have aided the YouTube algorithm to recommend Michael McDonald videos.
We all know that our online digital footprints cross all boundaries, regardless of which device we have used. I considered that maybe Comcast, the cable TV provider was selling data and noted we had watched the CBS Sunday Morning program. That's still a far stretch since the videos I was offered were specific to Michael McDonald, not the Doobie Brothers. I thought what the hell, how did "Big Brother" know this information about the birdbath and Michael McDonald which had only mentioned verbally inside my house?
My wheels spinning, I considered the one common denominator to both incidents was my living room. In the living room is a new smart TV. Now, to be sure, I had not set-up the smart TV in any way, we were still using Comcast cable and none of the TVs built-in features. However, I did connect the smart TV to the home wi-fi. I had never gone through the set-up menu and given approval for any on the TV's features including the built-in microphone. Yet, in both of these weird cases the TV is the only thing that could have been listening. Our iPhones have a feature that shows a yellow dot whenever the mic is on, and that is only on when using certain apps. So, I ruled out the iPhones. Additionally, I know my daughter did not buy the birdbath online. She works at a garden store as a part-time gig.
Could it be that the TV is listening and recording everything said for data mining purposes? Since all our devices on the wi-fi hide behind a single IP address dedicated to our (Internet) cable modem it is entirely possible that the next day our address triggered the ad bots at Google (YouTube) and elsewhere to target me. If so, this is atrocious. Big Brother is watching, Alexa is everywhere.
Maybe it stops at ads and videos, maybe it doesn't. I know for certain that this intrusion crosses all kinds of boundaries. I have been at work on company equipment using the Internet behind highly protected systems and my experience still includes ads and subjects that I explored at home or on my phone. At the risk of sounding like an angry progressive something needs to be done about this invasion of our privacy. This really is outrageous.
To be honest I cannot definitively say my 'smart' TV is listening to my conversations. It may be the iPad, which is almost always in the living room. If I didn't formally agree to let it, I believe it would be illegal. Nevertheless, considering that my daughter does use Alexa at her home is it such a stretch that Amazon knows she's my daughter and knows when my birthday is and has ads ready to spring on me the day after my birthday in the event I didn't get a birdbath? This would be easy for even the average IQ AI bot. I have heard that the machines sitting behind Alexa and Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and so on, know more about us than we know about ourselves. They have access to billions of transactions and the analytical data behind them. They have knowledge our personal proclivities (that we freely give them). They can compare enough examples of people just like us to easily predict what we will do, especially our buying decisions. I think we would be completely astonished by what big tech knows about us. Face it, we are the fish in their barrel.
We have most likely agreed to this in the fine print when we sign-up for these free services. Yet there is something creepy about this and it's unclear what the law says about this serious invasion of privacy. What can we do about it? Can we really get completely off the grid and avoid this? Probably, but it would be very, very difficult. Alexa is everywhere, her Big Brother is too.
Addendum:
As of this writing I need to covey that this sort of thing keeps happening, and it can be no coincidence. My TV or the iPad is listening and feeds the Internet bots and algorithms the things I say (this is where you ask, is this the beginning of his a slow, long decent into madness?). Then the very next day I see the results in my YouTube feed/recommendations etc etc. This example is just too coincidental to ignore... We were watching a show about renaissance art and at one point they showed some unfinished sculptures, and I said out loud "those must be Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures". Lo and behold when I opened YouTube the next day, I was treated to several videos about Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures. It is impossible that YouTube's algorithm just randomly fed me those suggestions. I've never seen a single video on Michaelangelo, let alone his unfinished sculptures. This is ridiculous, this is the world we live in. We are being spied on.
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