First, let me address something that was brought up on my Neocities profile. I'm sorry, but for the moment I can't locate the tumblr posts about Google locking accounts where NSFW content was found. Wikipedia was no help either, though it did remind me about Elsagate, which I had forgotten about until yesterday (do your mental health a favour and do not research that unless you're a professional journalist writing a piece specifically about Google's monopolistic behaviour). I know I didn't hallucinate this and I'm going to keep looking until I find it again. In the meantime, there's a new story about Amazon finally admitting it has been receiving and processing all your spoken words through Amazon Echo, something we already knew, but now it's been confirmed.
That's sort of why I'm here today. Home assistants, like Amazon Echo, and their ability to synchronise with all the smart technology in your home has been an absolute godsend for people with disabilities. It's allowed them the dignity of being able to turn their own lights on and off, adjust their thermostats, order groceries, and talk on the phone by doing nothing but saying a command. As with all able-bodied people, I tend to think of able-bodied people first, which came out pretty strongly in my last post. I am not suggesting that those physically- or mentally-disabled people who rely upon smart-home technology to live their lives in relative normalcy permanently switch off their own life-support. My demand was levelled specifically at people who have no disability, beyond the occasional bout of "can't be bothered to get my own drink", who are using smart-home technology as a convenience. Life doesn't have to be inconvenient, necessarily; but the new generation of convenience technology is designed to make billionaires richer with all other considerations being secondary.
"So, it's bad when I do it to make my life convenient, but it's okay if a disabled person uses it?" Therein lies the problem. Disabled people are perceived by the tech sector as open moneybags. It's not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of billions of dollars have been made over the past 10 years, taking advantage of disabled people, and smart-home technology makes it even easier. The fact that there are people whose quality of life is inextricably linked to smart-home technology is one of the most depressing facts about life in the corporate feudal state. So far as I know, the only FOSS alternative to Alexa, OpenVoiceOS, is incredibly technical to set up and configure; and, sadly, not everyone is lucky enough to have a computer nerd who installed Linux on her own laptop in their lives. Whereas, all you need to do to synch your Echo to your thermostat is press a button.
The sad fact of life is, if you have a disability that's profound enough to require smart-home technology, you never had any privacy. The government is always watching you, making sure you don't make any money, buy anything expensive, get married, have children, or shift flats; always attempting to intervene in your life and telling you it's "for your own good". Alexa is the corporate feudal state's insurance policy against allowing disabled people to live fulfilling lives; now with the admission that Amazon has been spying on every word ever spoken within range of an Echo, it's easy to see republican attorneys-general demanding Amazon's userdata to investigate welfare fraud.
Able-bodied people have it easy— in this case, all we need to do is stop using smart technology and then hope we don't get profoundly injured by anything sometime in the future, when state governments are using Amazon Echo to control what kinds of food disabled people are allowed to buy and how often they may use the bathroom before incurring a water tax.