"in every home." - only morons homes.

I think I'd be more worried that he might discourage investments that could help Amazon better protect its foreign customers against U.S. and partners' espionage efforts.

Or perhaps affect Amazon's procurement with non-transparent motives. Suppose these is a certain microarchitectural vulnerability in one vendor's hardware but not another's. If Amazon could be induced to buy the vulnerable hardware over the non-vulnerable hardware, that could help people who knew about the vulnerability spy on AWS customers. Or if there were a company to be rewarded or punished for its decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with some covert activity, the reward or punishment could be done through procurement decisions.

Or perhaps affect Amazon's lobbying at home or abroad about privacy legislation or something.

(It's not obvious to me whether the danger is particularly greater from a former DIRNSA than from someone with undisclosed connections to a spy agency. Maybe Alexander's recommendations would get extra scrutiny!)

> Amazon does have devices listening in every home.

No, they don’t. It’s a choice people make, and most aren’t buying Kindle, Echo or other near useless spying device like that.

Not true, a simple Google search reveals [1 in 4 US adults have a smart speaker](https://marketingland.com/roughly-1-in-4-u-s-adults-now-owns...). It _is_ a choice people make, and most don't care about privacy.

Not that it matters though - phones are [already a vector](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/) for the government to listen to you. I'm not sure this news really changes anything - the government already works with large US companies to spy on people, and then makes sure they're not allowed to disclose it to the public.

Also, I think Kindle is a great product, and wouldn't consider it a useless spying device. Each to their own though.

Well, the majority still aren't buying. The initial assertion was "in every home", which is false in the majority of homes.

That's correct. I just think saying "most aren't buying" gives the impression that it's not popular, when in fact it is a pretty widespread product. Not to mention Alexa being added into tons of other products such as smart thermostats, home theater speakers, etc. The number is only growing.

> Well, the majority still aren't buying. The initial assertion was "in every home", which is false in the majority of homes.

Are we assuming that all the individuals who purchased the devices live completely alone? There are only 128 million households in the US. [0]

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househo...

You cannot imply this, the stats is about US adult, many adult may also have the same speaker in their household.

This is precisely the point I was trying to make.

This is why I keep one of each in my home. By having an Echo, Google Assistant, and an iPhone, I figure I'm able to give everyone access to my data, making it worth less. (</s>)

Imagine with so much data, US still has so many problems and don't have "Minority report" yet... go figure...

sarcasm.

Amazon tablets are pretty cheap... I bet many, including myself for the kids, chose them.