Friday, April 12, 2019

Listen and learn

Keen to have a source of music in the kitchen/dining room, we recently invested in an Amazon Echo Dot. It was a rather grudging purchase, on the grounds that it supports Amazon, but the low cost seemed to make it a no-brainer. However, it's been sitting around in its box for a few months now waiting to be set up - and news stories like this make me less inclined to do so.

A drunken curry-house rant about smart technology and surveillance paranoia a couple of years back resulted in a friend buying me a ridiculous smart kettle as a joke birthday present. So the thought that we'll effectively be bugging our own home makes me rather uneasy.

Still, that's probably outweighed by the prospect of blasting out some songs to relieve the tedium of the washing up, and in any case I'm not sure what could be learnt from voice recordings made in our kitchen. Perhaps we should try to actively bamboozle the spooks at Amazon HQ?

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