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Amazon spying controversy shows that one way or another, free stuff is always going to be paid for

Today’s most creepily Orwellian story is about tech/retail giant Amazon. A Bloomberg story, picked up by Fox News, says that Amazon’s Alexa talk-to-the-computer ‘digital assistant’ service, which a lot of us use, has a bunch of listeners-in on the other side. Far from talking to a machine, as you think you might be doing, you are offering up some reality-TV for the hipsters listening in. And lots of them like to pick up the conversations, the ones that amuse them, and share their recordings of them with all their co-workers on some company bulletin board:

Here’s the Fox writeup:

Alexa is like having your own personal assistant that never asks for a raise. The problem is she’s always listening – and so are thousands of Amazon workers, according to a report.

Teams stationed around the world listen to and transcribe recordings, then send them back into the Echo’s software to erase the gaps in Alexa’s ability to understand speech, a report from Bloomberg said.

Sometimes the workers can even hear chatter in the background while Alexa is on but employees on the team are not authorized to speak about their work, Bloomberg reported.

Read the full story from American Thinker


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