September 24, 2023

Kieran Schmitt

12th Grade

The Hawbridge School

It’s no surprise that the Amazon Alexa has spread into what seems like nearly every household, but there are things potential customers should know about these devices before making the purchase.

Alexa is a personalized AI (artificial intelligence) powered voice assistant confined to a small speaker to be placed strategically around your house. The goal behind Alexa is to allow users to speak to it from anywhere in a room and receive support. This is designed to prevent distractions and increase efficiency in users. The handy tool can be asked questions such as: “What's the weather today,” or “Is an elephant a mammal?” It can also complete tasks for you, including setting an alarm, setting calendar events, or even controlling the lights in a room. Completing such tasks requires a subset of AI known as Machine Learning, which, according to IBM, "focuses on the use of data algorithms to imitate the way humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy." The appeal of such a device comes from the cheap price, with devices equipped with Alexa averaging around $40. These factors led to the rapid spread and succession of Alexa and a massive increase in profits for Amazon. 

Not all of Amazon's profits from Alexa come from the sale of the item though; rather, a large percentage of their profits come from the sale of user data. The ethics behind selling user data is questionable and has been in debate for years, even before the introduction of Alexa. The specific fear here though is not just the sale of the data users knowingly provide, but instead the data that users unknowingly supply. 

To better understand this, it's important to gain a better sense of how Alexas work. In order to talk to your AI assistant you need to “greet” it first. Amazon uses the name of the assistant, Alexa, to wake its tool. After you say the wake word, it will respond to the next things you say until it falls back asleep. The text that it hears is then compared against a database to try to recognize sounds and pronunciations. Once it does this, it then picks apart your words looking for important ones to get an understanding of the task it needs to carry out. It stores all this data to train its model and, although controversial, sells that data.

This may seem harmless, but it means that it is always listening to what you say, comparing every word against its database in order to determine when you are using the "wake word. In other words, while you may think the only data being sold is what you say while Alexa is awake, that might not be the case. It's hard to know as sources are conflicted on whether or not Amazon sells your unintentional data or not, but one thing is for sure, it's always listening and can gain insightful information about you from just about anything you say.

A study by the University of Chicago has shown that our purchases can predict our race up to ninety percent of the time. Another study by Christopher Wylie has shown that our music and clothing tastes can be indicators of our political preferences. For example, modern clothing and rap music preferences might indicate a more liberal person while country music and Wrangler jeans are indicators of a conservative. Music taste, clothing preferences, and purchases are all data that your Alexa knows about you and records. This means that politicians can better market to you just because you asked Alexa to turn on a song. There are many, many more applications for your data than just political preferences.

An Alexa can be scary to use, but the benefits are immense. At the end of the day, it's up to individuals to decide if it's a risk they want to take.