Amazon Echo raises the stakes on privacy in the home and IP protection in the digital age.

Is it safe or is there a storm coming over the horizon ? Difficult to tell. Great excitement about the new Amazon Echo (new to the UK) which is a voice activated networked microphone and speaker which allows interaction with the web via voice command. It is intended to sit in the home and answer questions, play selected music, adjust smart devices in the home order things online etc.

It works by constantly monitoring sounds in the home and responding to its name Alexa. However in order to recognise the word Alexa it needs to listen to everything and the microphones are so good that it can listen across the room and filter our loud music.

The convenience is very appealing but the loss of privacy substantial. Who owns the data that is collected by Alexa and the profiling that results from that data ? Who will carry the liability if that data is misplaced or stolen or for example voice activated financial transactions are carried out by the wrong people ?

A company with the scale of Amazon will have worked through these issues no doubt but the significance of networked always on audio monitoring in the home may not fully register with a technology enthusiast simply looking for an easier way to stream music in the home.

Privacy enters the search arena with DuckDuckGo, Oscobo and Hulbee

Size matters and the image of David with the head of Goliath is much more the exception than the rule.

The search market which is estimated to be worth over $80 billion dollars is dominated by Google at over 65% with Bing, Baidu and Yahoo all under 20%.

New privacy centric search engines DuckDuckGo (USA), Oscobo (UK) and Hulbee (Europe) have decided that consumers want to search anonymously and are not OK with the level of data harvesting that is going on.

A very interesting proposition that requires a high degree of trust from consumers but in the case of DuckDuckGo has seen 600% traffic growth over the last year.

With the rapid growth of ad blockers and the possibility that consumers will start to protect & value personal data more carefully there will be some adjustments needed to ad funded online models.