Given all of the security concerns raised by the rise of the Echo and other smart home hubs, Amazon surely knew that adding a camera to one of its devices was going to reinvigorate the privacy debate. After all, an always-listening microphone is one thing — the Echo Look, with a camera designed to sit in its owner’s bedroom, is another question entirely.
It should be noted that introducing any device of this sort into your sleeping quarters presents an inherent privacy risk to some degree. And indeed, at the very least the microphones on these devices are designed to be always on, listening for the trigger word that lets it start transmitting to the cloud.
And, of course, there’s a button on the Echo you can press to turn off the microphone completely. A red slash will appear to indicate that the camera and mic have been disconnected. Or you can go ahead and unplug the thing, just in case.
The company believes that its server encryption is secure, and it promises not to share any of that info, but the more these connected devices become a key part of our day to day lives, the more diligence we have to have to make sure they’re only seeing and hearing the things that we want.
