Last week I removed the penultimate vestige of a relationship with Amazon that has lasted 15 years: my Echo Dot was summarily retired, and in its place I installed a Bluetooth receiver for my old but awesome circa-1990s stereo. I simultaneously stopped using Alexa for my shopping lists and shifted that over to Siri. Next stop: cancel Amazon Prime and be done with it all. As in no more shopping on Amazon, no more listening to music or watching movies on Amazon Prime, no more asking Alexa to tell me the weather. Done.
I’ve done something like this before: five years ago I fired Google. I stopped using Chrome, stopped using Google Search, stopped using Gmail except as my go-to throwaway email address, and continued eschewing Android phones, Google Docs and other productivity apps. The issue was the same: my privacy and the security of my identity were much more valuable than any of the services this company provided. And I’ve never looked back – or regretted it. (Full disclosure, I still sometimes watch YouTube, but only from a private browser tab, and without logging in.)
The reasons I’m ditching Amazon are twofold: I can no longer be complicit in the systematic destruction of Main Street retail in my town or elsewhere, that is a direct result of the growing hegemony of Amazon in the retail world. And I can no longer keep handing over extremely private and personal data to a company that I simply don’t trust will keep that data safe and maintain a level of privacy that suits me. (I also don’t like that one of the world’s richest man keeps getting richer while his employees are stuck in lower middle-class mediocrity, but that’s for another time.)
Interestingly, while I’ve been worrying about my role in aiding and abetting a largely malevolent retail monopoly for some time, and even more so as the Covid-economy has ravaged local retailers, it was the privacy and security of my data that pushed me over the edge. So I’ll start there. Over the last few months Alexa has been asking me an annoying question: would I please positively ID my voice pattern so she can “get to know me.” The more I thought about this the more I wondered if I had ever explicitly given permission to Amazon to collect and use this extremely personal data other than for the purposes of communicating with Alexa.
Speech recognition is one thing – audio communication with a smart device requires it. Voice recognition, however, is a whole other kettle of phish. First, it’s not needed for engaging in ecommerce any more than an iris scan is needed to fit me with a pair of glasses. And second, watching efforts by malign actors around the world to bring to fruition a surveillance society centered around face recognition – with all its attendant illiberal and frankly racist implications – makes it clear to me that voice recognition has the same potential to do much more harm than good.
Taking this stand regarding voice recognition is important considering Amazon and its facial recognition software Rekognition. The word odious comes to mind when describing the track record of this software, to be blunt, and the record makes it extremely hard to trust Amazon. When one of my heroes, MIT researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Joy Buolamwini, published a study critical of Rekognition and other such products, Amazon went on the attack, criticizing Buolamwini and her co-researcher in a classic “shoot the messenger” gambit. They eventually backed down after ingesting a belly-full of crow over the incident, but it was clear they didn’t like to be called on the carpet for the built-in bias found in their product. (Buolamwini’s work on algorithmic bias, and the work of others, is highlighted in a new documentary called Coded Bias. Definitely worth a look.. Definitely worth a look. Also worth a look is this article by Zoho’s Raju Vegesna, in which he explores all the ways in which we are being surveilled by the technology in our lives. Zoho is one of a handful of companies that is taking a stand against these invasions of privacy)
So I went looking for some information on what permission I had given to Amazon to use my voice data, and what protections that agreement, whatever and wherever it was, afforded me.
And here’s what I found:
That’s right, nothing. There is no explicit agreement, no terms and conditions, no way for me to really understand the fundamental question: how exactly is Amazon using voice recognition — potentially my voice, if I were to acquiesce to Alexa’s annoyingly chirpy requests – other than the clearly misleading bromide to “provide you with a more personalized experience.”
So I kept looking. Somewhere in the fathomless chasm of Amazon’s support pages was an FAQ on Alexa that finally contained literally the only statement on their use of the “acoustic model” of a user’s voice that I could find:
If a user stops using Alexa and their voice is not recognized for three years, we will automatically delete the acoustic model for their voice.
Of course, deleting it after three years in no way rules out using it to build the successor to Rekognition or selling it to a third party to use however they see fit. And that was all I needed to know that Amazon actually was using my voice for commercial purposes to which I had not acquiesced. Because of course if they could they would.
So.. bye bye Alexa. It was sort of nice knowing you and your damned chirpy little voice. And while leaving you means my life is a little more complicated, those complications are high up on the white whine scale that I’m embarrassed that I even hesitated to cut the cord for as long as I did.
Which brings me to Main Street retail. Like most cities across the country, my town is a slow-moving retail train wreck. Everything “mom and pop” is threatened with the twin danger of Amazon on-line’s continued dominance and the Covid-economy’s destruction of in-person shopping. It’s depressing how many stores have gone out of business locally, and how many more will be gone before we get a handle on this horror.
The dominance of Amazon isn’t just because it is genuinely the best one-stop shopping site in the world. Which is it: as I have shifted my buying away from Amazon I’ve honestly had to, I hate to say, do without things I want. Yes, it’s true. The instant gratification, consumer heaven Amazon has created is very very addictive. And withdrawal sucks.
The whole process of ordering online and then waiting for the goods to magically appear always reminded me of the post-World War II cargo cults that sprang up in the South Pacific following the influx of well-provisioned outsiders in heretofore insular cultures. The continuous arrival of goods by plane, as the “civilized” world conducted a massive war throughout the region, became part of a belief system that, among other things, postulated that a “big man” would continue to bring more cargo to the islands even after the war had ceased, and with it the continuous transfer of goods and prosperity to the islands.
In some ways I think I know how they felt, both in terms of waiting for that manna from heaven as well as trying to reconcile the loss of cargo in my own life. I confess rereading that sentence makes me shudder: the cult of Amazon is a strong one, and I’m in the middle of deprogramming myself from it.
But whatever kind of “big man” Bezos is, he doesn’t play fair. Remember back when the dotcom era started, and online retailers, of which Amazon was a pioneer, availed themselves of a 1992 Supreme Court decision that effectively exempted businesses from paying state taxes if they had no physical presence in the state. Remember how viciously, and speciously, Amazon fought back at states that tried to collect sales taxes and effectively level the playing field again? Once it became clear the presence of distribution centers and other facilities removed Amazon’s exemption, the company threatened to move its facilities and their jobs to more “friendly” states. By the time states started forcing Amazon to pay taxes in 2012, mostly by legislating to close the loophole in the 1992 decision, Amazon had been in business for almost 20 years, its dominance fueled in part by what was effectively, in many populous states, a 10 percent discount afforded by not having to pass on the cost of a sales tax to its customers. That discount cost states tens of billions in tax revenue. I’m still trying to figure out why it was allowed to go on for so long.
Meanwhile, Amazon had grown from a mere $6 billion/year retailer in 2012 to a $136 billion behemoth by 2016. This massive presence set up the second fatal blow to retailers: Amazon became a secondary marketplace for retailers and B2C manufacturers desperate to piggy-back on the ecommerce reach Amazon commands. Which leads us to the recent decision by the European Union to go after Amazon for the practice using the sales data from its site to discern which products are selling well and then white-labeling versions as Amazon products and thereby cutting off the original retailers.
Of course its unfair to blame Amazon for the closure of every retailer, and in fact it’s not fair to blame the Covid economy for everything either. The Great Recession culled a lot of retailers – aided and abetted by competition from Amazon and other online retailers that had no brick and mortar stores or employees to pay for as revenues sunk. Amazon and recessions notwithstanding, retailers do come and go – like all businesses in an entrepreneurial society such as ours.
But as I look around me and see the decimation of local retail as Amazon continues to grow at more than 30%, I’m not proud that my cargo cult tendencies have played a role in that imbalance of nature. And as a watch the erosion of privacy and the use of advanced technology to bring the Big Brother state closer to reality, I increasingly want no part of that either.
So, bye bye Bezos. Bye bye chirpy Alexa. Bye bye cargo cults. Bye bye privacy leaks.
And hello… whatever will be left when the dust clears on this insane and devastating year. We shall see. At least it won’t be more of this unsolicited crap:
By the way, anytime is a good time for unwrapping presents. If you’d like some gift ideas, try saying something like, Alexa, give me holiday gift ideas for beauty.
Sorry, wrong number.
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