CNBC: Amazon dominates the $113 billion smart home market — here’s how it uses the data it collects

September 28, 2022 Interview, Media

Since Amazon introduced the Echo smart speaker in 2014, it’s remained the biggest and fastest-growing player in the smart home market. Its most recent expansion includes four new Echo devices, a new Fire TV, two new Ring cameras with features like radar-triggered motion detection, and the Halo Rise contactless bedside sleep tracker that can sense your breathing and movement to determine sleep stages. The new devices were all introduced Wednesday at Amazon’s annual smart home event.

Last month, Amazon made moves to enter a new segment of the smart home, with a $1.7 billion offer to buy iRobot, the maker of the smart Roomba vacuum. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is requesting more information from both iRobot and Amazon before deciding whether to approve the deal.

Earlier this month, 20 privacy and labor groups sent a letter to the FTC asking it to block the acquisition. The letter cited concerns about privacy and Amazon’s growing dominance of the smart home market.

“It has a camera in the front, which is a little bit unsettling. It can tell what you already have in your house, who’s in your household. What types of things might you want to add to that. So then they can target advertising on the Amazon platform in that way,” said Sarah Miller, who founded the American Economic Liberties Project, which also signed the letter to the FTC seeking to block the iRobot deal.

Miller of the American Economic Liberties Project said she is concerned about the growing number of devices that can collect user data.

“To track your shopping habits, to track your movements, to track even where things are placed in your home, what’s going on outside your front door. They can create this incredibly complex, detailed data profile that they can then use to expand and grow their own business,” Miller said. “And through that process, to push out competitors that simply could never surveil you with that degree of sophistication.”