Smart speakers and voice assistants arrived a few years ago to make our lives much easier. These allow us to interact even with elements of our home such as light bulbs or blinds. The most popular among all of them are the Amazon Echo, small devices, but they are full of possibilities. Using them is quite safe, but, Did you know that you are being watched while using yours?
While we are using our Amazon Echo, either to search for something or just using one of its Skills, the device is continuously collecting dataand then we will tell you how that affects our day to day.
You are being “heard” by your Amazon Echo
A study shows that Amazon would be collecting data every time we interact with our Amazon speaker with Alexa. This data is used, as we will see a little later, so that both the Echo platform and Amazon show us ads. directly related to our interests and our searches. In this way, advertisers will offer a much more efficient service and it will be more likely that we will click on each ad that appears.
This study is based on what is known as tracking & profiling, or what is the same, user tracking and profiling of their interests. When using our Echo speaker we have to have an associated Amazon account, and to carry out the study we have taken advantage of this feature using all kinds of searches or Skills from different categories to see what kind of ads appeared afterwards (especially if they were personalized). or generalists).
To do this, all the Internet addresses that were related to the Skills that were used have been collected, and once collected, it was verified which of them performed tracking & profiling. As you can see in the following image of the study, all the addresses that are in gray are the ones that used this procedure to profile interests, and as you can see there are not exactly few Skills that did it.
All this traffic was analyzed to see if it produced personalized or general ads. Some of these Skills ultimately led the user to receive typical ads, such as Amazon’s own products or common searches of all users. However, others were producing very specific product advertisements things that not everyone looks for like dehumidifiers or oils.
Specific and general ads.
Should we worry about it?
Our data and our searches are key for companies to they “throw” ads at us that suit us, since as we said above, this is key for more sales to occur. If you are browsing websites or Amazon and you receive very specific advertisements from this platform, you should know that this may occur due to the use of a Skill or some other Amazon product.
Is this dangerous? Privacy policies in Europe are quite restrictive, and this should not pose any kind of danger to the user. In fact, this is nothing new for us, since the famous cookies that we have been seeing on the Internet for years they do a really similar function. Therefore, you do not have to worry about your security, so you can continue using your Amazon Echo with Alexa without any problem.
