People are paying $10 a month to let Amazon's Alexa spy on them and spread AI-generated fake news—welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia.
From a privacy standpoint, the Amazon Alexa may be one of the most invasive devices ever created. It baffles me how people can watch crime or spy movies and see the extent that the characters in those films will go through to find and destroy surveillance bugs that are placed in their homes by law enforcement or rival gang members to spy on them, while having a device with the very same capabilities placed in a central location within their living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens.
Now, I can see a certain niche usage of Alexa for people with visual impairments or other impairments that would necessitate a digital assistant that's voice-activated like Alexa for quality of life purposes. But the vast majority of Alexa users don't fall into this category. They're able-bodied people who have a corporate wiretap in their home just so that they can ask it for pancake recipes or to play some songs for them occasionally.
After 10 years of Amazon's Alexa being free, the company has decided that now is the time, with all of the AI hype, to start charging a $10 a month fee for the privilege of using Alexa, or at least for the privilege of using an AI turbocharged version of Alexa. This is a project that Amazon has been working on for a while now since the AI fever started. After numerous delays, Amazon claims its overhauled Alexa service will be available in October. The new Alexa is also rumored to come with smart briefing, a feature that creates AI-generated summaries of news articles selected based on a customer's preferences.
So, Amazon is putting themselves in a prime position to broadcast some of the craziest fake news that you'll ever hear right into the ears of those who not only use the wiretap but pay a $10 a month subscription for it. One month before a presidential election, you better get used to cyberpunk dystopias because you're living in one now.
This $10 a month AI Alexa service is not the only recent example of tech companies changing their products from things that you actually own after a single purchase into monthly subscriptions that you never really get to own. You probably heard about the forever mouse that Logitech came up with a couple of months ago that would have required users to continuously pay for software updates for a mouse so that they could use it forever, which was also rumored to have an upfront cost of around $200.
Computer mice these days are pretty much all plug-and-play, even the ones that have several buttons, DPI switches, and extra scroll wheels. They just work with your OS drivers as soon as you plug them in. But Logitech thought that it might be a good idea for them to put one of the easiest things in computing behind a paywall that also comes with an expensive upfront cost. They were also claiming that the software for the forever mouse would offer macro support and a lot of other fancy features, but this can all be achieved with free software for the power users who want it without any extra monthly cost, and the software works with any mouse, not just the fancy $200 ones.
Companies are turning everyday gadgets into subscription traps, making you pay monthly for features you used to own outright.
For that much money, you can already get a very well-built mouse that will pretty much last you forever as long as you don't bash it around. Even cheap mice these days are rated for over 50 million clicks or so. Maybe if you play a lot of fast-paced games, you'll eventually wear out the left or right-click buttons on your mouse, but you may still be able to repair the mice and continue using them. For normal usage, a well-treated mouse will probably last you as long as the adapters that you use to plug it in are around.
Logitech has since backpedaled on the forever mouse idea because of how much negative press it's gotten, but that hasn't stopped other companies from coming up with ridiculous subscription fees for their products that you once used to be able to own outright. Anova, a company that sells smart sous vide cookers, announced last month that they were going to start charging people who use their app with the devices $2 per month for that privilege.
In case you aren't familiar with sous vide, it's a process for cooking food that involves sealing it in a vacuum bag and then placing it in water that's heated by one of these devices. This method lets you cook food to a perfect internal temperature without drying it out because all of the moisture is sealed within the bag. You can also cook several different things that are sealed in different bags at once if you have a large enough water basin. Sous vide is also one of the most hands-off cooking methods in existence, which is why, like air fryers, it's showing up in a lot of home kitchens and in restaurant kitchens.
Anova explains in their blog post about this subscription fee update that connected cooks actually cost them money. By "connected cooks," I assume they mean when you use the app to set the cooker and track how long it's cooking, instead of just manually setting that on the device itself. However, I have a really hard time believing this claim unless they just purposefully designed their app to run everything in the cloud instead of locally on the customer network. From what I can tell, the primary function of the app is basically a two-way smart thermometer. You connect to the sous vide machine over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, depending on the model, and from there you can see the temperature of your food in real-time, adjust it, and see how long it has to cook and adjust that too. All of that functionality can be done locally without any cloud services.
Requiring an internet connection for the app to function is basically a disservice to people because then you're not going to be able to use the app in remote places where you don't have internet. Anova also mentions that you'll get sous vide guides created by experts, which are basically pre-programmed cooking recipes, and they have a recipe search function and a recipe bookmarking feature. But again, all of this could technically be done locally in the app without extra cloud services, other than maybe hosting a recipe website, which also isn't terribly expensive to do.
On the bright side, they have said that people who created free Anova accounts before August 21st are going to be grandfathered in and not have to pay, but all the new subscribers will. Despite that, there are hundreds of negative comments below the blog post, some from people who even say that they signed up for an account before the period where it was going to start costing them money and are still being told that they have to pay.
From the computer mouse to household cooking appliances, products that people used to actually own are now not only tracking your usage habits but sending you a bill every month for their continuous usage. Imagine living in a world where you look over your monthly expenses, making sure that you paid the mortgage, the cell phone bill, the light bill, and oh, don't forget about paying the air fryer bill this month too. Last time you forgot, and you couldn't make late-night chicken nuggets without calling the Indian call center that's open when it's 2 a.m. at your house so that you can get your smart air fryer working again. Hopefully, people stick to their online reactions towards these greedy subscription services and pick gadgets that don't withhold basic functionality behind a $10 a month paywall.