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Kindle or Fire Tablet

They are Amazon’s answer to Apple’s iPad for
reading books, using apps or streaming enter-
tainment.
What it knows: What and when you read and
watch entertainment and news; when you open,
close and how long you use third-party apps;
your location.
Why that matters: Amazon knows exactly
how fast you read and how far you actually got
through your last novel. Kindles and Fire Tablets
are another way Amazon gets to know your
tastes, which helps it sell you things.

Smart lights, switches or shades integrat-

ed with Alexa

Connecting these devices to Alexa allows you to con-
trol and automate your home, such as making lights
turn off on a schedule, operate by voice or activate
automatically when triggered by another sensor or
device. Amazon says Alexa can interoperate with over
140,000 products.

What it knows: When and where in your house you
turn lights on or off; energy use.
Why that matters: These devices add to a body of
seemingly meaningless data that could help Amazon
make inferences about daily rituals, power use and
more. Amazon says it doesn’t use this data for
advertising.

Unlike the privacy settings for Alexa voice recordings, Amazon offers no way to tell it to stop storing data
from connected smart-home devices. (You can only set it to auto-delete after 3 or 18 months.) When I
downloaded the data Amazon had collected about the third party Alexa-connected devices in my house, it
contained more than 600,000 data points since 2019.

“Data enables, improves, and personalizes the features and experiences our customers enjoy,” says an
Amazon spokesperson.