Privacy may be a Thing of the past in new Homes

The nation's largest homebuilder says Amazon's Alexa will be built into all of its new homes -- with an Echo Show and an Echo Dot. Are there privacy concerns? You betcha.

Wired's Nicholas Thompson told CBS it'll only get worse in the future.

"They're potentially recording all the time, so there are huge potential privacy violations down the road."

Thompson says the privacy ship has probably sailed.

"Amazon is being cautious because they don't want us to be scared of them, but the way privacy and technology work is you just give it up as time goes on, so eventually they'll record more and they'll sell it to more places."

Thompson says you can use the Alexa app on your phone or go to the Amazon web site and delete every question you've asked Alexa -- but he says Alexa needs that data to get better and deleting it will return the device to the way it was out of the box.

"Now the problem with deleting all of it is that Alexa gets better as it listens to you, so if you do that it'll go back to how it was out of the box. I went to that setting and decided not to do it."

Thompson says it'll only get worse. For now, Alexa's microphones don't record everything -- they only listen when you say "Alexa" -- but Thompson says that will likely change in the future.


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