From Echo to Ring doorbell and Fire TV, are you comfortable with Amazon controlling your smart home?

guest · Feb 17, 2019

From Echo to Ring doorbell and Fire TV, are you comfortable with Amazon controlling your smart home?
February 17, 2019
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/...mart-home-echo-ring-eero-and-more/2875867002/

Amazon acquired another startup this week, the maker of the beloved tech product Eero, a mesh router that improves dead Wi-Fi spots in the home.
But, more importantly, it's an indication of how Amazon wants to go further than just making our homes "smart." It wants to turn our dwellings into the "Amazon Home."

Your guests are greeted at the door with a video doorbell from Ring, a company Amazon bought in 2018. They enter a living room where an Amazon Echo speaker plays music as it waits for voice commands.
Then they head to the kitchen, where an Amazon microwave heats up dinner [...] You ask Alexa to dim the smart lights [...]

Are you comfortable with Amazon controlling so much of your home? On Twitter, some weren't this week.
Click to expand...

Now, with Amazon taking on Eero, "you can't really escape Amazon in the home," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with Creative Strategies. "One big company is delivering too many devices."
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guest · Feb 23, 2019

It looks a lot like Amazon wants to hide Alexa inside your web router
February 23, 2019
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-alexa-mesh-networks

From an ease of access point of view, combining a router with Alexa functionality makes sense. Why have two small pucks when you can combine them into one?
If Amazon’s systems were integrated into a home’s internet router, would it make it even easier for the company to know what’s happening under a person’s roof?

Eero’s privacy policy says the company does not track internet browsing activity, but it does collect personal data such as name, telephone number and e-mail address during setup of accounts, and automatically collects device data when in use, including MAC and IP addresses for connected devices. Wired.co.uk understands that Amazon has no plans to change eero’s policy at this time.

“With that pretty anodyne information you can build a certain profile of an individual, and can make inferences.”
If it were able to know what devices were owned, at what times they were used, what they were used for, it could build a detailed picture of a household, even without specific information about internet browsing.
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From Echo to Ring doorbell and Fire TV, are you comfortable with Amazon controlling your smart home?

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