“This is not a consumer device company that takes privacy very seriously,” Gamero-Garrido says. Since people use smartphones far more than Alexa or a Kindle, he says an Amazon smartphone today would “significantly increase the scale of the potential privacy harms.”
Gamero-Garrido thinks Amazon could use Transformer as a data-gathering tool to glean how people use its devices, build its advertising network, and compete with the likes of Alphabet and Meta, which are facing regulatory scrutiny in the European Union and California.
One way it could do this is through the Fire TV approach. This is Amazon’s TV streaming platform integrated into a third-party TV (or via a dongle); while you may not have bought a Fire TV-powered TV from Amazon, the data collected by the operating system is still owned by the company.
“Whether they end up succeeding with this phone supplement device, or whether they eventually use a similar model where they install their operating system on other phones or ”light” phones that are built by third parties, it has the same effect,” he says. “Ultimately, what Amazon is doing is centralizing all the network traffic through its own infrastructure so it can improve its advertising business.”
If Amazon can detect when a person is sick from the sound of their voice, then it can recommend that you buy specific cold medicine from Amazon Health—that’s a real patent Amazon owns. If this is now powered on a device you carry everywhere, Gamero-Garrido says it can listen to more of your conversations and serve you better ads.
Even with its past regressions, customers have shown a general acceptance of Amazon’s hardware, says Kassem Fawaz, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who researches security and privacy in consumer devices.
“I think when it comes to products, unfortunately, consumers value utility and price over privacy,” Fawaz wrote in an email to WIRED.
The accelerant here could be Amazon’s Devices & Services lead, Panos Panay, who joined the company in 2023. Panay famously helped turn Microsoft’s Surface line of computers into an aspirational hardware brand through his “pumped” and emotionally charged keynotes.
Panay has already brought that kind of energy to a few Amazon hardware announcements, like the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, though he has not matched the success of Surface. If Amazon is truly making a smartphone, it will need to generate a lot of passion to entice customers.
“If someone can do it, it’s going to be Panos,” Jeronimo says. “For that, I have total confidence. He is the right person for these kinds of initiatives.”
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