By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | June 16, 2017 |
By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | June 16, 2017 |
I love my Amazon Prime account. I love the “free” two day shipping. Amazon made my favorite show of the year. I love my Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV stick. I like my Amazon Echo a whole bunch. The new Amazon Look terrifies me.
So, what is the Amazon Echo Look?
Warning: the first girl’s voice asking Alexa if it’s going to rain is weirdly jarring. Also, just laying around on couches asking robots if it’s going to rain later is absolutely a key step to us becoming this:
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That said, here’s their pitch:
It’s a whole new way to get dressed!
Hey Alexa! Am I Hot Or Not?
Oh, 64% say no? Fucking sweet!
And it’s one step closer to machines taking over the universe. But that’s not what really concerns me.
The legal documents I accept without reading are what concern me. Because yes, I have an Amazon Echo, (Just the regular canister kind, not the video kind that a Macedonian hacker overpowers and jerks off to), and in so many ways it’s great. My stellar reviews of it actually convinced both Dustin and Seth to get one. But the thing that kind of irks me is that it’s always on…just sitting there…listening.
Yes, it’s listening for its name to be called, theoretically. For you or some member of your family to say “Amazon” or “Alexa” depending on which wake word you chose, but it also keeps an audio record of your requests, ostensibly to improve its voice recognition capability, but c’mon.
That’s not how I’d parent, but that’s just me.
Oh FUCK OFF Alexa. If that is your real name.
Anything — and I mean ANYTHING that has human beings associated with it is going to have some corruption. You think there are no Amazon interns randomly parsing data? You think that Amazon is so noble that they don’t randomly just pull sounds from your home and chock it up as an audio pilot exercise?
C’mon.
I mean, I hope they don’t, but…c’mon.
It’s why we ended up disconnecting our Xbox Kinect. First because the games for it were largely worthless, but second because why would we ever have a fucking CAMERA pointed into our living room?
But it’s not on.
Yes, it is.
No, really, there’s a little light that goes on if it’s on.
So, you couldn’t hack your way around that?
I mean, maybe, but-
And at no time has any Microsoft employee improperly accessed anyone’s camera?
Well, I can’t know-
Right, none of us can. But what do you think? Is there any clause inside any of the many many many irritating contracts we click to get them the hell out of the way that maybe says that Xbox can periodically conduct unannounced quality checks to make sure third party instrumentation is working within spec?
Ummmm
Yeah, that means they’re covered if they want to watch people fornicate.
NOTE: Apologies for the lousy, defective polls. I remember Straw Polls being cooler. Now it’s comic sans and captcha and they don’t seem to work. I won’t be using them again. I really needed Alexa to make a poll for me. “Alexa are you recording my credit card number when I order pizza over the phone?
No? Okay cool.” Poll is conclusive.
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