I still don't have an Amazon Echo. I signed up for the invite the day they announced it back in early November, refreshed my email like an idiot for a week, and then made myself stop checking. My buddy Dave somehow already has one sitting on his kitchen counter, which he demonstrated for me over Skype by asking it to add paper towels to his shopping list in a voice slightly louder than necessary, the way people talk to Siri in public. It worked. I was jealous for about four seconds.
Then this whole Uber thing happened and I got a lot less jealous.
If you missed it, a BuzzFeed reporter published a story about an Uber executive floating the idea of spending big money to dig up dirt on journalists who write critical pieces about the company, and specifically naming one by name. That's bad enough on its own. But it dragged the "God View" tool back into the conversation too, the internal dashboard where Uber employees could apparently watch a live map of everyone's rides, including reporters, including at least one case a couple years back where a journalist's movements got pulled up at a launch party as a party trick. Nobody at Uber seems to think that's weird, which is the part that gets me. Not that the tool exists, tools exist, but that using it to make a point at a party felt like a totally normal thing to do out loud in front of a room.
So now I'm sitting here thinking about the little black cylinder Dave has on his counter, the one that's designed to sit there listening for the word "Alexa" all day so it can spring to life and help you set a timer or play some music. It only sends audio to Amazon's servers after it hears the wake word, at least that's the pitch, and I mostly believe it. I'm not typically the tinfoil hat type. I still don't cover my phone camera or anything like that, though I'll admit I did put a strip of electrical tape over my laptop webcam a couple years ago after that whole extortion-via-webcam scare, and I've just never bothered to peel it off since. Habit, mostly, not paranoia.
But there's a difference between "I mostly believe the marketing" and "I have any actual way of verifying it," and that gap feels a little wider this week than it did three weeks ago. Uber's a ride-hailing company, not a home electronics company, and the God View stuff is about location data, not audio. I know it's not a perfect comparison. But the underlying thing that bugs me isn't the specific tool, it's the attitude, the sense that once a company has access to something intimate about your life, using it casually just doesn't register as a big deal internally until somebody outside makes it one. Uber's response so far has mostly been "we have a strict policy," which is the sentence every company says right after it turns out they didn't really enforce one.
None of this is going to stop me from wanting the Echo, for the record. I still think it's a genuinely interesting piece of hardware, and ninety-nine bucks for Prime members is a fair price for something that's basically a always-listening speaker with a decent assistant baked in, assuming the assistant actually holds up outside of a demo. I just think it's funny, in a not-really-funny way, that the same week a company got caught being cavalier about the trust customers put in it, I'm sitting here still hoping to get invited to put a different company's always-on microphone in my kitchen. I read Amazon's privacy language on this like I read most privacy policies, which is to say skimmed it once, nodded, and moved on with my life, which is exactly the behavior that lets this stuff slide in the first place.
Anyway. Invite still hasn't shown up. Dave says the thing is genuinely good at hearing him from across the room even with music playing, which honestly might be the detail that talks me back into it regardless of any of the above. I contain multitudes, or I'm a hypocrite, pick whichever one sounds better.