Random ways I can think of to harvest sqft of your house:
1. Satellite
2. MLS records and/or building plans
3. Don't amazon drivers drive past like every single house at least once a day at this point? could probably do something with that.
Plus, I would be shocked if "amount you spend on amazon per month" doesn't nearly linearly correlate with your income, if that's what they want. Plus doesn't equifax et al literally sell these datasets for this explicit purpose?
I agree in principle that in general I do not want amazon to have an internet-connected LIDAR thingy mucking about my house, but also I struggle to figure out what specific privacy delta is happening here that would be a watershed moment.
TBH still kind of reeling that most TVs have microphones on them with no clearly policy that they're not always listening (vs phones get a lot more scrutiny) and things to that effect. If I were going to try to improve my privacy, moving to a dumb TV is probably something I'd do well before I got rid of my amazon-roomba.
violations of the principle of least privilege
TVs just introduced the potential for a camera/microphone and the manufacturer receiving that info directly instead of just the cable co.
"okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?"
- I've never found that ignoring one leak because there's another fixes the pipe.
"You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has."
- 20 years ago who would've thought that TV's would all be capturing your life on record. At best they can check what channel you're watching.
The concerns seem quite plausible: means, motive, and opportunity.