SEATTLE – Aug. 27, 2020 – Last month, Amazon introduced a gadget: Amazon Halo, a new tool aimed at improving people’s fitness and mental health.
The product consists of a wrist band powered by AI technology that measures how you sleep, how you move, how you communicate and how you connect so that you can gain insights into your well-being via an app. The app has the latest body vision technology to make an accurate 3d body scan to better map your progress. In addition, the wrist band has a microphone and the Halo app uses machine learning to analyze your tone, voice and emotion to support you in your social relationships and well-being (Amazon, 2020).
Halo is a new cool way to measure, track and improve your health every day. Pretty stylish isn’t it? Pink, blue, gray or purple, they come in all colors for just $64.99 and they are even water proof!
This all sounds great fun and helpful, but technically Amazon is spying on your everyday life. Not only what you do, but also how you feel and who you talk to. This is a huge invasion of your privacy since Amazon Halo monitors your conversations 24/7 in the background. In addition, Amazon retains the conversation transcripts in their servers and Amazon’s privacy policy does not even mention anything about the tone analysis at all, which indicates a serious privacy breach (cybernews, 2020).
What do you think? Is Amazon Halo a cool gadget or the begin of a scary surveillance state?
Sources:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/people-of-color-probably-should-not-buy-amazon-halo/
https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/introducing-amazon-halo-and-amazon-halo-band-new-service-helps
Very interesting read! Halo sounds like a technology that a lot of people could benefit from. However, I am also concerned by the fact that people could become obsessed with the way they move, talk ect… How much true to yourself are you when you know somebody is listening and watching you? Furthermore, I completely agree with you on the fact that Amazon having all your data does not sounds very comforting. People should be careful and think twice before buying Halo.
Dear Elias,
Thanks for your post about Amazon Halo.
I do agree that it’s another invasion of private space, however the mentioned “beginning of a scary surveillance state” is somehow already happening. Consumers seem to have agreed to companies “spying” on their private lifes. And there are several products, that enjoy a huge consumer demand, whilst being known to invade private space.
With the emerge of smart watches, the easy creation and collection of private health data was made popular. Apple for example, started to collect health data of its users in large scale in 2015 with the introduction of the Apple Watch. Whilst it is not entirely clear what exactly Apple is doing with that data (despite developing its Health App), it can be inferred that Apple has a big interest in harvesting health data. This assumption can be supported through the launch of the new Apple watch series 6, with even more features to collect (crucial) health data.
Further, introducing smart home devices like Amazon Alexa/Echo, Google Home/Nest or the Apple Homepod, major players have established a new status quo of consumers placing (data collecting) gadgets within their private spaces, that, apart from recording the commands spoken to them, are also known to record conversations and more.
And the probably most important invasion of private space happened with the emerge of smartphones. Location, speech, app usage, pictures taken, and more… every data point generated is being recorded, stored, and most likely shared with the retailers of the operating systems. Most consumers probably don’t even know how much of their data they are giving away for free or to which level their privacy is invaded. And even with several functionalities being turned-off, how can a consumer be sure that nothing is happening in the background?
Whilst it might be scary to hear about all that private data being transferred to the companies, this process is also offering advantages to the consumers when it comes to new products developed. Companies gather a lot of insights on product usage, start to understand the consumer better, the needs and the challenges, being able to develop better products and services. But right now, all those insights they have, are given to them for free, without the users knowing it in the most cases.
Therefore, a main topic that might be up next, even if it is very likely to be disliked by (dominant) market players, is to find a way to give the consumers back the power over their private data. There are several projects in line, especially in the crypocurrency world (like DATA for example), that focus on that exact idea. However, it will probably still take a while until companies will have to “pay” users to use/acquire their personal data, and until then it seems like consumers either need to live with the fact of companies invading their private space, or have to agree to not use all those (smart) devices at all.