Amazon's Latest Gimmicks Are Pushing the Limits of Privacy
At the end of September, amidst its usual flurry of fall hardware announcements, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other.
The first is a small autonomous surveillance drone, Ring Always Home Cam, that waits patiently inside a charging dock to eventually rise up and fly around your house, checking whether you left the stove on or investigating potential burglaries.The second is a palm recognition scanner, Amazon One, that the company is piloting at two of its grocery stores in Seattle as a mechanism for faster entry and checkout.
Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenientbut for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags.
The company also owns Ring, whose smart doorbells have had myriad security issues and have been widely criticized for bringing unprecedented surveillance to traditionally semi-private spaces. Meanwhile, the biometric data that Amazon Go will collect is particularly sensitive, because unlike a password you can't simply change it if a hacker steals it or it gets unintentionally exposed.Amazon has a strong record for maintaining the security of its massive cloud infrastructure, but there have been lapses across the sprawling business.
Ring's Always Home Cam, which integrates with the home security system Ring Alarm, rests in a dock that physically blocks its camera most of the time. When you set up the product you walk it around your house on the different flight paths you want it to take and those become the only places the drone can fly.
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