Alexa, What Are You Doing With All My Personal Information?!

Let me start by saying I’m all aboard the technology hype-train. I am excited for the future. However, sometimes we need to slow down a little bit and think. It’s not all about what the technology does for us, but sometimes rather what it’s doing for its creator that we should really focus on.

Here are the three things that no-one is telling you about the wonderful future of ‘smart homes’.

“Alexa, what are you doing with all my personal information?”

Everytime you search for something with your Google, Amazon, Samsung or Apple powered personal assistant they collect that data with the justification that it will be used to create ‘greater customer experiences’.

When you purchase and place these voice-driven assistants into your home, you are quite literally opening your front-door to every business on the internet. Okay, this is a bit dramatic, but I’m technically right.

Voice assistants are another way for Amazon, Google and other tech giants to gather even more information than they already have about you. For example data gathered from Alexa found that choc-chip cookies was the most requested recipe by its users. Sure this sounds innocent enough, but these are just the insights they have publicly…