I am in my 30s too, and I remember reading articles saying that DHS had hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations they would never get to because they all needed to be manually reviewed.
When the company selling a suspiciously cheap home speaker ('stocking stuffer') is the same company that boasts of having infinitely scalable computing ability and is the only cloud vendor that meets the Pentagon's procurement requirements, people are justified in thinking that Amazon's ambitions go beyond 'making it easier to order online'.
Just so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell?
The people who have "hacked and reverse engineered" the Echos don't have access to what happens on the server side. We are facing a situation of either trusting or not trusting, because verification isn't possible.
There should be a word for believing that someone is working for your interests even though you have no reason to, as a counterpart to "conspiracy theory" which implies that you believe that a group is working against your interests without having a good reason to. It's like people have a conspiracy theory where Amazon is conspiring in secret to help them.
I'm not sure I follow - just capturing packets from them tells you how much they're sending to their respective motherships, e.g.[1].
Amazon of course is not exactly conspiring to try and get me to buy more stuff from them (they're very upfront about it), which makes them both more crass and also easier to trust in some ways than Google.
It wouldn't have to be perfectly covert. Also it wouldn't have to be purposeful, spooky collusion between private and public sector from the start. That's an unfair assumption and a bit of a straw-man. What's going to happen is Amazon and others will develop methods to collect ambient data at all times and sift through it efficiently for marketing info--come on, you know for a fact that they are doing that--and eventually there will be another fucking patriot act, some awful legislation that is blatantly unconstitutional but nobody cares and brows are furrowed and think-pieces are typed up but the law goes through regardless--the feds will eventually subpoena the massive cache of data Amazon owns, they'll make a bit of a show of resisting for PR's sake, but eventually law enforcement will get it. And maybe they'll use it to solve a legit case, they probably really will. But forever after that tool will be in the hands of whatever regime or agenda reaches office. It's not ridiculous and people shouldn't dismiss it so easily.
Infosec conspiracy theories are different from normal conspiracy theories because while normal ones are pretty much always bullshit, infosec paranoia is always proven sensible on a long enough timeline. Yes, there will be an incident sometime soon where law enforcement builds a case through evidence gathered with a virtual assistant using AI or something to sift through all that audio. The constitutionality of this evidence-gathering will be superficially questioned but it'll end up getting admitted anyways, or used sneakily via parallel construction techniques. Assuming it hasn't already happened.
They've already done it with phones. Providers and manufacturers used to resist, but after lots of murky "national security" legislation they can't really refuse anymore. Ever read about how the stingray was first discovered, and that law enforcement was sneakily using it extra-legally to build cases? Now it's pretty common knowledge that your phone can be tricked by a fake cell tower and there's nothing you can really do. But does anyone give a single shit? Nah. It's normalized. Every successive technology that is developed and added to the panopticon toolkit will make us more and more accustomed to it. There's been enough overreaches and abuses of technology already that you shouldn't have this blase attitude about it. But that's not how people really work.
If you've been following the news for the past few months or years, you should know that this conspiracy theory has a higher chance of being true than not.
When the company selling a suspiciously cheap home speaker ('stocking stuffer') is the same company that boasts of having infinitely scalable computing ability and is the only cloud vendor that meets the Pentagon's procurement requirements, people are justified in thinking that Amazon's ambitions go beyond 'making it easier to order online'.