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What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard
For years, Alexa has been our on-call vet, DJ, teacher, parent, therapist and whipping boy. What secrets would the data reveal?
Our requests ranged from prosaic to troubling and downright bizarre – there was very little we didn’t ask Alexa Last year, I realised that my relationship with Amazon predated my mortgage, my marriage, parenthood, two distinct careers and a host of other significant life moments. We are, for example, opinionated and argumentative, the Echo in our kitchen being regularly called on to adjudicate on disputed facts, most recently “Alexa, are ducks and geese the same thing?” We didn’t know how old Zendaya or Michael Bublé or Jeremy Corbyn or 67 other celebrities are, and this knowledge was at some point important to us. And they’re not just listening and responding, but sending the sound files and data to Amazon’s servers, where they are stored, processed and analysed, giving the most sophisticated retailer in history access to a treasure trove of information on who we are, what we want, what we need and what we desire.
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