Amazon is Watching You

You would be shocked at what is being captured

I recently found the option to get all of the Amazon data that has been collected on me over the last 23 years. A few days after requesting this information I received an eagerly awaited email with a compressed attachment that held 135 MEGAbytes of information. Here’s what this uncompressed file looks like:

Because I don’t use Alexa, I was very surprised to open that file folder to find two recordings in there where I must have accidently said the word Alexa somewhere in my home (even though I turn off EVERYTHING Alexa and even go as far as to cover the microphones on my remotes, etc).

There were only a few suprises in this data dump. One being the mystery Alexa files (BTW, for you out there who use Alexa… you are being recorded every single time you use that “service” and, in some cases, being recorded even if you aren’t! Every search you perform, every single thing you ask “Alexa” for is being captured), the other being a few pictures of friends and family that I must have put on my Kindle at one time or another. The pics were about 10 years old.

In my case, because of my diligence, most of the information was pretty benign.

For those of you out there that still don’t get it. Those who don’t realize that your entire life is being digitized and every time you use FB, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube, so on and so forth, every single thing you do is being captured.

I have long ago unsubscribed from pretty much everything because of what I just said above.

It’s quite literally *impossible* to live in a free society without privacy. And, it seems, people are more than happy to give up their privacy (and liberty) for just a tiny bit of convenience.