I'm surprised anyone wouldn't think so.
TVs are the same. And phones. And most web sites. And buses, walls, taxies, public transportation stops, bridges over roads etc etc.
One has to work hard to defend against the ad onslaught these days.
TVs are the same. And phones. And most web sites. And buses, walls, taxies, public transportation stops, bridges over roads etc etc.
One has to work hard to defend against the ad onslaught these days.
To me it represents pure evil and I don't see how you could defend against it. Except for not buying into this stupid shit.
Cortana or Siri exist without obvious nefarious purpose. Alex and Google are clearly trying to push advertising. I know which I would prefer to set timers and play music for me.
Now imagine the data they're collecting from their suite of amazon devices, where you can't control the data-mining.
That could be look at what $politicalPartyAffiliates in your area consider important enough to change allegiance, so that a party that's marginal can present themselves as good for $socialGrouping in order to sway the vote. It's not necessarily just about purchasing.
It also allows analysis of other aspects of life, like, say, people who search for drug paraphenalia -- or a step further away, music that's associated [by someone] with people who take drugs -- which festivals are they going to this Summer ...
That targetted selling may have no direct effect through the Echo itself, but the potential is there to increase the influence on you in other channels.
There may be other info, we have 3 kids who use our FireTV: I'd imagine they can estimate the child's age & sex and give targetted advertising in emails/web pages to companies selling toys for those ages. Based on the apps (whatever they call them, skills?), they can probably target that much better.
It's not nefarious, but what happens if you ask a question like "open a website where I can buy music" or "find me a powerful new computer", or whatever. Is there no bias in Cortana/Siri towards MS/Apple? How about if you ask "is Siri or Cortana a better voice assistant?" ...
The fact that you interact with it each morning is more powerful than any print, broadcast, or web ad Amazon can buy. They're gotten into your brain. Even if you never see the device (which is now a visual billboard in your home), when you think about it, you're thinking about Amazon. You've already been commoditized and you don't even realize it.
Do you really not see the inherent problems with these devices, or is the remote start just that nice? =D
For example, by far the most common argument against these devices is that they could be spying on you by listening to your conversations 24/7. This is true, they could be. However, it's also true of cell phones, which 99% of the complainers have had near them 24/7 for the past 10 or 20 years. If you think the Echo is a terrible device because it could spy on you but you keep a cell phone in your pocket all day, you're trying to justify a negative emotional response to the Echo, not rationally analyzing the situation.
The comment I replied to above, by reaperducer, attempts to argue that the Echo is implicitly commoditizing me every day because I interact with it. This may be true, but does that also mean I'm being commoditized by Whirlpool and Moen and Philips and Tesla and Trader Joe's? If yes, then what does that even mean, and how am I meant to avoid it?
You then jump in with a vague hypothetical about a future update making the device start trying to sell me socks. I'm pretty sure Amazon isn't going to start putting ads in with my music or weather reports. If they do, I'll stop using the device. It only cost me $30. I've spent far more on devices that now sit on a shelf unused. That's just the nature of consumer electronics.
If you want to convince me that these devices are inherently bad or have massive inherent problems, it's really simple. All you have to do is tell me what problem they cause me that could be eliminated by getting rid of the device. So far, everyone who's attempted to do this has either stated a problem that wouldn't be eliminated (e.g. the spying potential or the daily interaction getting the brand into my brain) or a problem I don't suffer (e.g. getting ads).
I have an Echo and it is helping Amazon get better at selling me stuff. When I try to list the probable or even possible harms from this, I can't come up with a lot.
Compare that to something like driving my car. 100 people every day are killed in their car. Even so, I still drive because the expected utility of getting to point B is much greater than the expected harm from doing so.
I use a car and the worst case scenario is death or permanent disability, right? People die in their cars every day.
So what's the worst case scenario for using an Echo? How many people a day does that happen to?
What's the worst case scenario from having an Echo? How many people does it affect each year? What's the dollar cost of that damage?
IMO, it isn't an imminent threat. It's not going to kill you. It's not going to cause you any physical harm. It's the slow erosion of privacy which is a detriment to everyone.
I'm going to avoid the cliche Orwellian arguments and the normalizing surveillance arguments. Both of these have been addressed ad nauseaum. I'm going to go a different route and see if it resonates with you at all.
It is incredibly easy for humans to be manipulated. This only gets easier as we have treasure troves of data about individuals. Amazon has many of the smartest people in the world working to manipulate you to do things in their best interest. Sometimes their interests lineup with your best interests and things are great. Other times, their interests will be negative to your life.
It is in their best interest for you to not be content with what you have. It probably is your best interest to be content with what you have. It's not wrong to want things, but things will never fulfill you.
I'm not saying capitalism is evil, Amazon is bad, or that we aren't living in one of the best times in human history. I am saying that putting a marketing device (which is also a privacy concern) in my home is not something I am interested in. Especially when I can do the 90% with my phone in 5 thumb presses.
I like the driving analogy because even though the worst case scenario is about as bad as it gets, it's not all that likely. I think people, even here, have a hard time separating possibility and probability.
A connected speaker has real and immediate benefits for some people. People that use it to buy stuff (I do all the time) aren't going to see ads for associated products like website shoppers do. Frankly, if the Echo scares you, https://amazon.com should scare you even more. I bet they collect a lot more data in a 10 minute browsing session than they do with months of Echo use.
This is somewhat correct but misleading. It's always listening for the "wake word" -- alexa or echo -- and then it processes your request. But it's not sending all conversations up to amazon. Just your alexa requests.
However, this is a device that requires internet to function and is managed by them giving you zero control beyond unplugging it.
As a note, for non-rooted users, it's common for Android vendors to push mandatory updates. Both my last Android phone and tablet before I left the platform were pending 'mandatory' updates where I had to kill a process after booting to prevent them from executing.
This person gave a very good explanation here:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/7m91u9/if_go...
I have a bunch, and you only really use them for about 5 things, with the most useful thing being music.
Once was when an actual person was speaking and another time was when the TV show 'The Sopranos' was playing in the room. In the latter case, I rewound the show several times and it triggered on the same phrase multiple times (and the character was not saying anything that sounded like Alexa, at least to me)
Think of the children!
It should however come with a severe warning about what it is doing in a way that my mother would understand. Otherwise she would just see it as a nice thing to tell her what to do.
So would there be a major difference in consumer behavior if it was generally known that the advice given by the echo is paid advertisement?
If Yes -> then governments should take notice.
If No -> then interference would just inhibit the market.
At one time nobody was forcing us to pay private health insurance conglomerates every month, yet here we are.
All it takes is some clever lobbyists and some cash, both of which Amazon has in spades.
Wow. Do you really believe that it's government job to guarantee ad-free Echo?
I mean you would agree that a bunch of people could organize a boycott of Echo with ads and eventually Amazon would stop selling it and sell Echo without ads and that would be fine right? So why don't we just do that? It's because we lack a coordination mechanism, the incentive of individual boycotters is to cheat. Luckily humans have developed a great coordination mechanism called 'democracy' and we can use it when coordination in the market place has failed.
I could agree that companies be required to have a disclaimer when they provide preference to a certain product set over another.
Sure, that's one possibility. Probably not a very realistic one but it's there.
>I don't see why you would immediately go towards having the government step in and regulate whether Amazon can make the Echo prefer their own products quite yet.
Why should we immediately go towards another company/market-oriented solution? What is it about government that requires we wait around for the market to fail? Why not just go do what we want?
We can. We do. Most people don't care about beeing spied on, so they buy it. So they also would not support your democracy introduced market improvement.
Besides, a market can't regulate itself, if there is allways a government regulation in case something is not nice.
And I do actually believe, people would buy the adfree, non spying device, if they would have a choice
So that's simply a market opportunity.
I find that sort of thinking pretty scary. I'm incredibly hesitant to expand the purview of the government into whether products should succeed or fail. It sounds like what you're saying is that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, so we should enact government regulations to think for them. This is something markets are very good at, as others have stated. Expanding the government's role in things should be an absolute last resort, to me.
If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?
I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook? It's the same thing there: people trade their personal information for perceived value in other places (Facebook: keeping in touch with people, Google as access to information). Should the government be the ones to decide who should be allowed to make decisions about their information?
It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool. To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
Third question: should you be allowed to trade my personal information for cheap cool gadgets?
In other words, don't give your number, to people you don't trust.
In the prisoner's dilemma are the prisoners stupid? No, they're actually defined as rational. What makes them come to their collectively poor outcome is that they have no way to act collectively, they require coordination. Those prisoners could be smarter than you and me, they're still trapped by the rules of the system they exist in.
>If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?
Our own government has some problems with this but since we're being a bit high-minded here, let's ask ourselves what a democratic government ideally is. It's just a way for individuals to coordinate with each other.
Prisoner's Dilemma again. By market mechanisms, we're going to jail for two years. We may meet some strange definition of freedom but if we're both rational then we know we will never realize the option of serving lesser sentences. To me though that isn't real freedom so we can see then that a coordination mechanism isn't here to curtail freedom, it's here to grant it (it lets us both choose to remain silent.)
I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.
>I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook?
If the people collectively decide that then yes.
>It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.
Well here let me rework this:
It's scary because once the people get to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.
You're right that is powerful, we should have that power.
>To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
Let me rework this also:
To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
> I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.
This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all. I also disagree that the better outcome is to grow the government's role in something like this. To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.
> If the people collectively decide that then yes.
I think we have to be very careful about how this is used; people collectively decide silly things all the time ("Pink Slime" comes to mind, for some reason), and we have to be very careful about how we encode things into law. Once the government is responsible for something, it's hard to walk back on that. Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.
> To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
This may be true to some degree, but it aligns pretty well with people's changing opinions and wants/needs. If we're careful about some things (e.g. monopolies, access to information, etc -- things that allow markets to work efficiently), we can avoid having to bring out the sledgehammer when it's not needed. Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia); that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement. This is a case where I believe this to be especially true.
But that's the point of the prisoner's dilemma. Individuals who are educated, can make informed decisions, have access to information about the results of their decision will always make a decision that isn't the best decision they can make. What the prisoner's dilemma reveals is that the only way to beat the game is through a coordination mechanism. Nothing else will ever help.
>This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all.
Hmm so in the prisoner's dilemma you don't see the prisoners without coordination as handicapped? To me it's obvious. Prisoners with coordination realize the best overall outcome, prisoner's without coordination are never able to realize that outcome. Seems straightforwardly handicapped to me.
>To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.
I'm providing you with examples where the invisible hand doesn't work the way we like to pretend. The hand is guided towards overall societal benefit by individually selfish actions. What I'm talking about are cases where individually selfish actions lead the invisible hand to overall societal detriment. And that in those instances we need government as a way to coordinate together so that we may reposition the invisible hand where we desire.
>Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.
Fluid isn't necessarily good however. We will persist 'fluidly' with Echo with ads until we get the government to act and then we will exist 'statically' with Echo without ads. I suppose I'm fine with that static-ness.
>Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia);
You're being a bit funny with 'government involvement' here. Maybe there should be some corollary to Godwin's Law where the first one to compare a government program to Mao loses. Anyhow, I'm not talking about seizing the means of production, I'm talking about regulating existing markets.
>that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement.
There's also plenty of instances where government involvement is better than markets. That's the case I'm making - essentially that we need government regulation as a way of reigning back the invisible hand when it goes awry aka smart homes that secretly advertise to you.
You keep using the word "coordination", and I guess I just don't see it applying in the way I think that you mean. There are other, perhaps better, ways to coordinate than governmental intervention. You've said that boycotts don't work, but I'd say that if the market doesn't want a product, it will fail; why does a government have to enforce that? A boycott may fail because a loud minority isn't representative of the overall market; isn't that the behavior you want?
You may find the references to some communist revolutions distasteful, but I think it's an appropriate comparison in that folks see government as the solution to a problem that markets solve really well. I specifically didn't say that what you're espousing will lead to 50m deaths, but I do think it's a useful tool for showing where government can take on too big of a role with regards to things that markets are very efficient at doing themselves.
>"I suppose I'm fine with that static-ness."
Isn't Hacker News full of people that explicitly disagree with this? That static laws are a big tool for incumbent companies to build their moat, and entrepreneurs try to break those down in ways that are intended to be better for everyone. Maybe you disagree (which I respect), but in many ways, static laws look good on the surface but have real downsides in the long run.
> aka smart homes that secretly advertise to you.
I don't think that these things should be done secretly. I think companies should have to make this information available to consumers, and I think the government should enforce this to some degree (e.g. if a company is recording my phone calls to send back to their headquarters, absolutely it should be known).
That sounds like the Byzantine Generals Problem. Prisoners can communicate all they like, it just doesn't really matter what they agree at the end of the day.
Even if the prisoners are allowed to communicate, if there is no underlying coordination mechanism, some binding agreement, a punishment for breaking the agreement, etc. then the default state is still defection.
>What it sounds like you're saying is that the government should tell the prisoners what to do. I prefer the former, because I think it keeps the responsibility still on the prisoner ("consumer" in our case).
I think this is the part that most people (and maybe you) get stuck on because the basic idea is that you give up one freedom to gain another. The prisoners are stuck. Until each one tells the other "if you squeal on me, my brother will kill you on the outside." Now, where they were once trapped by the rules of the game a new rule has been added. Do the prisoners gain or lose freedom when they threaten each other? The answer is neither because they never had any to begin with. In both scenarios they are trapped into picking a specific choice by their own rationality. The difference is that pre-threat they were trapped into a suboptimal decision and now they are trapped into an optimal decision. Coordination is the only thing that mattered here and it allowed everyone to benefit.
Now if we move this analogy over to government intervention in markets, which component of the analogy is 'government'? Easy, it's the mutual threat. The government isn't some outside entity and it isn't telling the prisoners what to do, it's the agreement between the prisoners and it's the enforcement mechanism of that agreement. The government here isn't reducing freedom (or increasing it) on an individual level but on a societal level it's granting us the freedom to move to more optimal outcomes.
>You've said that boycotts don't work, but I'd say that if the market doesn't want a product, it will fail
That's just not true. The prisoners want shorter jail terms, yet they'll fail to get them. Where you and I are clashing is the difference between individuals and society.
>why does a government have to enforce that?
Because otherwise it won't happen. There has to be an enforcement mechanism to for coordination to work. Otherwise defecting will dominate.
>You may find the references to some communist revolutions distasteful, but I think it's an appropriate comparison in that folks see government as the solution to a problem that markets solve really well.
Like I said, see Mao's Law. It's absolutely distasteful and not an appropriate comparison at all.
Besides we're specifically talking about problems that markets don't solve.
>Maybe you disagree (which I respect), but in many ways, static laws look good on the surface but have real downsides in the long run.
I do, but if you look at what I said you can see that my 'static' scenario and my 'fluid' scenario are both equally static. In one we're static because we're stuck by government regulation, in the other we're static because we're stuck by market rules (we can't coordinate.)
>I don't think that these things should be done secretly. I think companies should have to make this information available to consumers, and I think the government should enforce this to some degree (e.g. if a company is recording my phone calls to send back to their headquarters, absolutely it should be known).
You know who else liked government enforcement? Hitler. This is an appropriate comparison btw.
Yes I would. I don't see why you need to "organize" it though. I don't need any form of organization to not use product I don't like.
> It's because we lack a coordination mechanism, the incentive of individual boycotters is to cheat. You lost me here. You have internet full of coordination tools if you really feel like boycott of echo should be coordinated, just set up a fb group :).
Boycotts are basically ineffective, especially the social media kind.[1] Why are unions effective at coordinating? Because there's a punishment if you don't coordinate (you have to leave.) Why are elections effective at coordinating? Because everyone reveals their preference all at once anonymously and the collective decision is binding. Why do I and my coworkers coordinate? Because I have a supervisor who will fire me if I screw up.
In this way I see your point is that we should only use coordination mechanisms which are basically ineffective. As soon as we approach a coordination mechanism which is effective (government) you start to condemn it.
Don't get me wrong - I see your point, but in order for this "ad tax" to be legitimate in my eyes it would need to be an actual issue discussed before the elections. If your elected officials declared, that their priority will be to introduce advertisement tax and they won the election with this promise then I'd accept it as a reasonable action. (but I still believe that it might be easier to just ignore all overly ad-ridden products and wait for ad-free alternative)
For TV you can pay for ad-free experience (like HBO), this option is comming to online services as well (youtube red). I feel that this process is more efficient and faster way to eventually get echo like service that won't sell it's users as a product.
My concern with gov't action is the second and third order effects. Governments are implemented primarily by bureaucrats, whose primary incentive is to maintain their job. Any policy that gets implemented poorly (inefficiently), tends to continue because of the employees personal incentives.
This suggests, to me, that governments (as they are in America today) should not be experimenting. Culling the losers is super important for exploration, and probably the thing our local/state/federal gov't is worst at.
(If a company makes repeatedly poor decisions, they will tend towards insolvency/change in management.)
So, yes, we as people, as citizens, and as a society, through the collective apparatus we call "government", can and should step on advertising quite strongly to help us as people, as citizens, and as a society recover from the onslaught of the last few decades.
This is but one way.
I was not questioning whether the advertising industry is good or not, but rather OP's notion that he is entitled to ad-free echo service.
I agree that advertisment should be more heavily controlled in instances where people don't have a choice whether to see the advertisment or not. But nobody is forcing anyone to buy a device that is known to serve you ads. If enough people will make this choice, the business incentive for the producer of the device will disappear and so will the device.
Government exists to curb abuses.
The internet and smartphones are, but even those are not snooping in on your conversations (or so we believe, hence the hue and cry about Facebook listening in). Alexa is different in that it’s listening to all your conversations, including presumably extremely private ones.