How is is reasonable that people who don't work for Amazon be expected to speak like Amazon's marketing department?
Companies like this hires tens of thousands and some people do dumb jobs. PR is mostly a pushing/prodding game with no guaranteed ROI, so they resort to weak attempts like this.
It sounds distasteful with a light shown on it but it really isn’t too different to how most of the meat is made in the blogging industry as a whole. With these high output blogs mostly just repurposing corporate press release kits.
I’m sure Vice only wrote the original blog post because some Amazon person emailed them a presser about this residential program, and Vice did their usual snarky article about it.
This sort of article, which shines this light, might make these companies think twice before "asking" to control the narrative.
A super notorious example of this is Apple insisting/asking that their devices are referred to without any determiner like 'the' or 'an' e.g. 'We think THE iPhone is really important' to 'We think iPhone is really important'
It would be like Tesla taking issue with someone calling their car "an electric motor". Sure it has those things, but that's not what it is.
Totally reasonable change imo.
Amazon sells literal microphones in addition to the Echo. That sentence could be referring to literal microphones under the AmazonBasics brand for all I know.
"While it’s natural to be chiefly concerned about privacy when your apartment comes with an Amazon microphone pre-installed, we should also be critical about where the data extracted from us ends up."
In that one sentence, the actual one from the actual article, the word microphone is accurate and makes far more sense than anything else.
It’s bully behavior and should be setting off alarms at the FTC. Stunts like this should scare Amazon middle managers.