Smart Assistants

Smart assistants are becoming increasingly popular in today’s world, with major players such as Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa all taking up a large portion of the market. These assistants, with the use of mass amounts of data and machine learning, are delivering services such as home automation, intelligent question answering, reminders, online ordering and more to the user to make every day life tasks easier. However, we don’t often question exactly what we are giving up in order to benefit from these luxuries. With Alexa’s echo hardware, you are basically intentionally bugging your home with an always on listening device. We generally trust the companies that make said devices to protect our information and keep it anonymous, but that doesn’t mean that it is always true. Plus, even if they are using the highest privacy standards, there is always the possibility of your account being infiltrated by a third party. When it comes to Google’s services, you have the ability to see exactly what is being tracked and used by it’s services by going to myactivity.google.com. This gives you a comprehensive list of everything that is being used by your various Google services. For Alexa, you can access a list of the queries you’ve made through the Alexa app.

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