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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Amazon's New Phone is Not Your Friend" -- Its a Panopticon in Your Pocket
Online retail giant double-charges customers by selling a phone that is simply a portal to its shopping serviceJune 24, 2014 1:45AM ET
by Joshua Kopstein
The new Fire phone runs the same operating system as the Kindles do, and it goes a step further by boosting Amazons shopping service in more novel (and unsettling) ways. Its ironic that a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sparked international anxieties about government spying, Bezos is selling a phone that features not one or two but six cameras. Four of those cameras are forward facing and are capable of advanced head tracking and face detection, something Bezos said took the company four years to develop. They support an innocuous-sounding app called Firefly, which uses the phones cameras and microphone to watch, scan and listen to everything around the user. If youre listening to music or watching a movie, the app will automatically identify and log your selections. Firefly even uses the phones camera mode to identify and save all the objects you come across in the physical environment, such as the books in your house, the landmarks you visit while sightseeing and the paintings you see at the museum. (Bezos says the app can recognize up to 100 million items.)
It may seem novel and quirky, but the message is clear: Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff. And crucially, it wants you to do so on a $649 device that channels that urge directly to its storefront, all the while gathering more precious data points about your communications, relationships and movements.
Double-charging customers
Amazon is not uniquely at fault for this trend, even if its implementations are the most explicit and unabashed. Facebook, for example, has a long history of slowly changing its default privacy settings so that users unwittingly share more data with more people an obvious benefit to the company, whose business model depends on monetizing user data with targeted advertising. Commenting on an infamous privacy bait and switch in 2009 that left millions of Facebook profiles exposed to the entire Internet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, We decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it.
This is in some ways to be expected from free services such as Facebook and Google, which we grudgingly use knowing their true cost is in the data they collect from us. But its quite another thing for Amazon to charge money for devices that surveil and monetize their users and, moreover, serve as portals to the companys online shopping mall.
Such double-charging of customers is becoming common practice in the technology space. In 2012, Verizon Wireless began selling data about its customers as part of a service called Precision Market Insights, including their smartphone Web browsing habits, geolocation information and app usage. Earlier this year it expanded the program to collect Web-browsing data from users when they log onto Verizons website to pay their bills.
This flies in the face of the common mantra about Big Datas business model that if youre not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Companies such as Amazon and Verizon want to have their cake and eat it too, making us both the customer and the product. And too often, theyre finding they can get away with it.
CONTINUED GOOD READ AT:
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/amazon-new-fire-phoneshoppingconsumerprivacy.html
Joshua Kopstein is a cyberculture journalist and researcher from New York City. His work focuses on internet law & disorder, surveillance, and government secrecy.
onehandle
(51,122 posts)Wow!
Amazon and Google are lighting the path for the NSA.
Cooley Hurd
(26,877 posts)No one is innocent of that.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)I don't think I'd want to be around anyone with that kind of ability to scan my house when they come to visit but "Selfie" addicts will probably love it.
"Its ironic that a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sparked international anxieties about government spying, Bezos is selling a phone that features not one or two but six cameras"
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)One of the many reasons why agenda-minded writers are more of a detriment to the public discourse than an asset...
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)and most likely bankrolled by the NSA or the Pentagon, as some DUers have noted...
I'm flattered, but I'm afraid you overstate my level of influence...
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)I'm actually talking about how you're being transparently hypocritical. And not even just that but literally using the medium of accusation to confess your own sins.
Almost like writing out a murder indictment against someone else using the blood of your own murder victim as the ink. It's quite beautifully recursive.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)What, exactly are my "sins"?
It's 0234 here in the east, so my mind isn't that sharp and I apologize but I'm not quite catching your intent...
Colorful metaphor, though...
And exactly how do I "flatter myself" when I say up front that in the grand scheme of things I'm insignificant and do not matter? Self-flattery isn't one of my "things"...If anything, I'm harsher and more unforgiving of myself...
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)While "contributing" to public discourse, on this forum, through the drive of a clear agenda.
Beautifully recursive.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)we all have agendas...Or did your shit stop stinking all of a sudden?
I'm pretty sure I've laid out multiple times in previous threads exactly what my 'agenda' is, so there's no great mystery to uncover and I've made no effort to hide it...
In spite of whichever of my personal character flaws you wish to rub my face in, my earlier point still stands...
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)The difference between you and I is that I don't try to scapegoat the essential nature of my own agenda by denying the drive behind agenda. Of course, that drive is to influence. If you didn't feel as though you were influencing in some way, you wouldn't bother to argue at all.
That Glenn Greenwald is more influential than you speaks only to the fact that he's better at a job we all aspire to master. If you were suddenly to become incredibly influential over night, would you all of a sudden abandon your agenda driven arguments? That's a ridiculous idea.
arcane1
(38,613 posts)Well, that explains why I can't pay my bill online without first disabling Ghostery. It's only been the past couple of months that this has been the case.
Sigh... I'll have to start paying my Verizon bill from work
Trillo
(9,154 posts)What I remember is that cable companies charge subscription fees and show the same customers commercials, so that's the earliest double-charging model that I remember. Are there other, earlier examples?
Initech
(99,881 posts)This is one phone I will never purchase. Between this surveillance phone and the shady business tactics they employ that Stephen Colbert uncovered, I'm surprised they haven't been investigated by the SEC yet.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)eShirl
(18,462 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)If I was an Amazon fanatic and had a Kindle...maybe I would like it.
But...I've stuck with B&N's NOOK which they just upgraded...and I'm fine, so far with it. At least they don't have a camera that can be "turned on" with spyware and I can still feel some sense of Privacy....
Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)Egnever
(21,506 posts)Uncle Joe
(58,029 posts)Thanks for the thread, KoKo.
Hekate
(89,976 posts)Sorry, but that's it. We're probably the last people we know that don't have a smartphone that we use all the time. Our kids use smartphones in lieu of landlines entirely.
This is beyond creepy, what Bezos is doing.
When the news about the NSA broke from Snowden/Greenwald I was the only person at DU that swore up and down that we Americans have already voluntarily given up all our data to Big Corporations and have paid good money to do so.