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The Real Cost of Smart Speakers

Privacy tradeoffs and hidden costs behind convenient smart assistants.

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More than one third of American households have a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo or Google Nest that can be activated by thousands of different voice commands. But in order to hear what we say, these devices also need to listen. This video looks at what big tech companies do with recorded smart speaker commands and how customers can opt out of sharing their data. 

Questions:

  1. Why does Amazon collect recordings of voice commands made by customers to their Echo devices? 
  2. Do you think tech companies like Amazon and Google should require users to “opt in” to data sharing rather than “opt out” of it? Why or why not?
Author: NickelsMcHughMcHugh

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