Some years ago, one of the top-selling technology companies (Amazon) revealed pretty accurate information on how many warrants, court orders and investigation help they were asked to provide to the “authorities”. While every other tech giant had regularly published its government request figures for years, spurred on by accusations of participation in government surveillance, Amazon had been largely forgotten.Eventually, people noticed and Amazon acquiesced.
Since then, Amazon’s business has expanded. Actually, it’s no longer a retail website, but a big technology leading company, that works in the cloud and makes devices for the community. The company’s flagship Echo, however, is an “always listening” speaker that collects vast amounts of customer data that’s perfectly opened up for the government, which is a fear of most conspiracy theorists.
Actually, Amazon has been really deceptive in how it presents the data, omitting the exact figures in its short, but contextless, twice-a-year reports. Not only does Amazon offer the minimum information possible, but the company has, and still continues, to deliberately mislead its customers by actively refusing to clarify how many customers, and which customers, are affected by the data demands it receives annually, which to me sounds like an act of terrorism.
A few weeks ago, after lots of users showed interest in this topic, Amazon spokesperson Stacy Mitchell stated that the reports that the company publishes “actually focuses solely on Amazon”. They say that the reports are only product related, but don’t mention which products, services and etc. are an object of consideration. This brings me to the idea that they actually have something to hide. Whoever threw questions related to this topic, he could easily feel how submissive they tend to act, when asked those simple questions.
We live in days when we feel that our lives depend on technology. Just imagine a full day, without any smartphone/laptop/tablet/smartwatch/TV or any other type of tech in use. Being so open to the “unknown” makes us highly vulnerable to attacks – both from the government or hackers. We tend to forget that on the Amazon Echo there are 7 microphones, that constantly listen to your speech and record it so that it can, therefore, translate it. If we go so easily and believe anything that such a big company says, that means that we are no longer open to research and we no longer care about our privacy, which transforms us into money-spending robots that don’t happen to think at all.
