Amazon’s Astro takes surveillance capitalism to the next level
The device is capable of capturing precisely the personal information that is most powerful for retailers: everything that happens in your home.
Well, they did it. Amazon announced a home robot, as rumored.
Amazon’s Astro is priced at $999.99 for the invitation-only promotion, which you can request. The actual retail price will be $1449.99.
The Astro is described by some as essentially an Amazon Echo Show smart display on wheels. But that description fails to capture what a radical product this is.
In addition to wheels, they added artificial intelligence navigation and a host of sensors — plus the mission to use your home’s WiFi connection to upload much of that data to Amazon’s servers for “processing” and indefinite storage.
I predicted back in April that this product would be a bad idea. Now that Amazon has announced more details, I’m still convinced of everything I wrote.
Here’s what Astro can do. The robot can carry or deliver things around the house; a bin can be converted into two cup holders for schlepping up to 4.4 pounds of whatever.
The Astro can be used for video calls; the 12-megapixel camera sits at the end of a telescoping pole that raises the camera to a height of 42 inches. The base unit has two speakers.
Astro integrates with Amazon’s Ring doorbell and security system, as well as a service called Alexa Guard, which detects the sounds of breaking glass, smoke alarms and other sounds that may signal an emergency situation. If Astro detects a “stranger” in the house — someone not recognized using face recognition, it will follow that person around the house. (As a security tool, the follow-the-intruder feature is easily defeated when there’s more than one intruder or when a burglar drop-kicks the Astro across the room.)
The robot returns to its charging bay to charge itself, much like a Roomba does. It can “patrol” the house on a schedule, checking for motion. It will follow you around like a hungry dog if you tell it to. A feature called “hangout” prompts Astro to stay near where people are in the home (“in case it’s needed”), unless someone says “Astro: Go away.”
The two-foot tall Astro contains cameras and sensors that create a 3D map of the inside of your house. You can name the rooms, so later you can tell Astro using voice commands to go into specific rooms. It uses face recognition, so it knows who’s in your house. (It will only recognize users who explicitly register their faces with the device.)
In short, the Astro duplicates other Amazon products and, beyond rolling around, doesn’t do anything for users that can’t already be done by other Amazon products.
And I predict that rolling around will be a problem. Sure, the Astro can easily navigate the fake homes in the Amazon promotional videos — clean, dry wood floors and tight, low carpets. I doubt it will fare well in real homes, with toys and laundry on the floor, thick throw rugs and other real-life obstacles. It can’t go up or down stairs, or outside. It can’t go over bumps or level changes in a house. Despite the AI hype, it almost certain will get flummoxed over navigational issues.
The other user “benefit,” is cuteness. It’s designed to simulate a pet, to some extent.
Astro’s “eyes” are just animated images on a screen, which at launch may convey limited information by blinking and expressing cartoon emotions, but which could be software-upgraded in the future to show more facial expression and intentions. The robot also turns its head constantly to feign consciousness and to anticipate turns. Amazon designers worked hard to give Astro a simulated “personality.”
Unfortunately, Astro’s “personality” is really just a spoonful of sugar to help the surveillance capitalism go down.
Why I don’t trust Amazon’s Astro
Anticipating privacy concerns, Amazon cobbled together functionality and policies that prevent wholesale capturing of personal data.
For example, they designed options like setting “out of bounds” zones — say, don’t go in the bedroom with your cameras and microphones — and a “do not disturb” setting. A green light shows when the camera is capturing video. A button turns off all cameras, microphones, sensors and motor. Amazon claims that face recognition data is stored on the device, rather than in the cloud.
I rifled through the Amazon Astro Terms of Service Agreement and the Amazon Astro Privacy Whitepaper, and here’s what I found.
The white paper specifies that: “the obstacle sensors use reflected infrared light and ultrasound to generate distance measurements to the floor or surrounding obstacles and to determine if there is a step down. The raw data from the navigation and obstacle sensors is locally processed into a distance measurement and discarded after processing, without retaining images or video or sending them to the cloud.”
Amazon says it won’t use 3D maps captured by Astro for marketing or product recommendations.
But while Amazon wants the public to believe that Astro won’t capture private information, some of the stated policies exist in a kind of privacy grey area.
The Astro Terms specify that both video streams and Astro’s 3D map of your home are uploaded and stored on Amazon’s servers. But they didn’t say why. (Why not store that on the device?)
Photos and videos captured by Astro are stored in the Amazon Photos service. The Amazon Photos Terms of Service says that Amazon “may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Services to you, enforce the terms of the Agreement, and improve our services, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical support.”
To truncate this legal mumbo jumbo for clarity, you give Amazon permission to “use,” copy and modify your photos and videos and to use information about them, which is vague and open-ended.
The Astro Terms of Service says that all voice interactions through Astro are governed by the Alexa Terms of Service, which specifies that “Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions, such as your voice inputs, music playlists, and your Alexa to-do and shopping lists.” It doesn’t define the word “processes” and it doesn’t say for how long these “interactions” are retained. (We can assume forever.)
The Alexa Terms of Service makes clear that the Alexa service will monitor who you’re interacting with. It says that, when you send messages or make calls through Alexa, all that metadata is categorized as “interactions,” and so it’s uploaded and stored. The Terms also specify that “Amazon will periodically import and store your contacts.”
Regardless of Amazon’s current policies, the fact remains that Astro is the Mother of All Surveillance Capitalism tools. For example, the videos and 3D maps of your home captured by Astro tell Amazon:
How big your house is
How high the ceilings are
What kind of furniture you have
Whether or not you have pets, and what kind they are
How big your TV is
How empty or full your closets are
What the daily rhythm of activity is in your home
Who is using electronic devices like smartphones when and where
And a hundred other facts about you, your life, your homes and the products you own
How many people in your family
The approximate age, gender and other information about the people in your home
Whether anyone is pregnant
And a thousand other things
This is the Holy Grail of surveillance capitalist information.
Is it reasonable to assume that Amazon has no interest in this information, or that such data has no value in the centerpiece of Amazon’s secret for dominating retail, which is product recommendations?
Amazon prides itself on its deep learning algorithm, which it calls Amazon Rekognition, a machine learning algorithm that automatically recognizes objects and products. Amazon boasts it can recognize millions of objects per minute, per user.
Amazon told me they don’t currently intend to recognize objects seen by Astro, but that they “can’t comment on future plans.”
I’m more concerned about “future plans” than current policies. Amazon’s history is littered with aggressive bait-and-switch tactics — for example, selling products at below cost until they’ve wiped out the competition, then raising prices. Promising privacy as they capture and store terabytes of data on each Astro user, then changing their policy to retroactively process all that data for competitive advantage is consistent with Amazon’s aggressive approach to retail.
Violating user privacy for surveillance capitalism aims doesn’t make sense unless Astro goes somewhat mainstream and wins over millions of users. And it won’t go mainstream unless they convince the public that it’s private.
In other words, they need privacy now to profit from violating privacy later.
That’s all speculation on my part.
Still, I do believe consumers have every reason to be suspicious of Amazon’s intentions with Astro. The device is capable of capturing precisely the personal information that is most powerful for retailers, and doing so would give Amazon a powerful monopoly on that most valuable personal data — what happens every day inside your home.
Amazon is a secretive company. So we don’t know exactly what its intentions are with the Astro robot. But so far, it looks like Astro is the ultimate Trojan Horse designed to harvest the greatest crop of user data ever captured by a surveillance capitalism.
It’s cute, though.
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas
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LG's new line of Direct View LED Extreme Home Cinema Displays maxes out at an 325-inch 8k TV that costs $2 million. Too much?
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A startup called Immertia will enable small, "ultra-realistic" holograms on product packaging. Today, you see the hologram by holding your phone up to it and running the app. Later, this will work with smart glasses. We're facing a world where opening the pantry reveals a cacophony of product holograms yammering away and driving us all nuts.
Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotion
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