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Here is the second part of the article that Barry forwarded to me last month.
Halo band
A health-tracking bracelet with a microphone and
an app that tells you everything that’s wrong with
you.
What it knows: Your activity and movement; heart rate; weight; sleep patterns; your voice (for
tone analysis); images of your body for estimating body fat; food consumption, preferences and
shopping lists.
Why that matters: Amazon wants to be your artificial-intelligence doctor, or, at least, life coach.
But the Halo band can be invasive. Amazon says it doesn’t sell your body data, share it without your
permission or use it to target you with sales pitches — but that still leaves plenty of other ways for the
company to mine your information.
Echo Show
An Alexa smart speaker with a camera and screen for
video calls, recipes and sharing family information.
What it knows: Collects most of the data from
standard microphone-equipped Echo speakers,
along with facial recognition maps for individual us-
ers (stored and processed locally); records video of
areas in view of the camera; logs how you interact
with on-screen widgets and skills; detects smoke alarms, glass-breaking or other activities.
Why that matters: The addition of a camera gives Amazon another view into your home. On some
Echo Show models, the camera is always passively scanning for movement or faces, and Amazon
could retain records about the faces it sees.
Echo devices also use your life to feed advertising. Researchers recently discovered Amazon uses da-
ta from how you interact with Alexa to target ads you see on Amazon and other sites where Amazon
places ads. (You can opt out of Amazon ad profiling at this link if you log in.)
“We don’t sell customer data to third parties or use customer data for purposes that haven’t been
disclosed to customers,” Schmidt says.