Let me get this straight.
Giant corporations can activate listening devices in millions of American homes as often as they’re willing to pay for it. But high school teachers can’t tell students to read, “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
In this age of seething and irrational political rage, I figured I’d ease things up a bit by writing about some of the world’s less significant aggravations. You know, just to keep things light.
Then I saw Buick’s current “Alexa” commercial and that rose straight to the top of the list.
Any commercial that triggers my Alexa device bugs the hell out of me. But this one is particularly obnoxious as it’s an entirely intentional intrusion. The company, its marketing people and ad execs were well aware their commercial would activate millions of Alexa listening devices with each airing — and the commercial aired more than any other car commercial in late May — 1,570 times the week of May 30, according to iSpot.tv.
The irksomely perfect family in the commercial says the Alexa name eight times in 30 seconds. Yes, I counted. (To be fair, our device only dinged and activated three or four times, but that could be because it was still on from a prior reference.)
We’ve all grown accustomed to, if not happy with, Alexa’s occasional, unprompted, rogue interruptions. But now a huge corporation is intentionally activating recording devices in millions of homes at a time. Think about that for a second.
Every time someone says, “Alexa,” the device starts listening and recording whatever is audible in the room for the next 5 or so seconds.
This bothers me, but not in the paranoid, Big Brother, top-secret government surveillance sort of way. On the contrary, I’m fully aware that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and a few other companies are monitoring and manipulating all of us, all the time. And for the most part, I’m OK with it. Sure, I’m a little unnerved when a Facebook ad for an item I was just talking about shows up in my feed. And of course, Amazon reads me like a book. It knows what I’m going to buy before I do.
But I figure I’m more informed, and thus more vigilant, than at least 50% of the world. I’m also not what anyone would consider a high-value target. (Hacking my bank account would be akin to burglarizing a vacant double-wide.)
The car commercial troubles me more because of its intrusive underhandedness, the ulterior motive. There’s clearly an ulterior motive. So I wasn’t surprised the commercial also repeats the word Buick more than nine times in 30 seconds, thus ensuring it’s recorded multiple times on millions of Alexa devices — along with snippets of every conversation occurring during the commercial.
My question was why. How do they benefit? So I did some reading. Turns out, Amazon has a way of neutralizing its own Alexa commercials by teaching the devices to recognize a specific reference as well as widespread media events, and ignore them. But there’s no evidence this teaching tool was used for the Buick commercial. And an April article on TheVerge.com reports that the small snippets of Alexa recordings are indeed used to send us targeted advertising. Surprise, surprise.
But back to the list of minor aggravations that, if eliminated, would make the world a slightly better place.
- Can we please make it illegal for scooters to use a full-sized parking space? That’s just rude. And even more so when the driver pulls all the way in, so we don’t see that the space is occupied until we’ve committed to pulling in.
- Email attachments with text that can’t be copied and pasted. I don’t care how fancy your flier or poster looks. If you want your information in the paper, I need the text.
- Cilantro, especially when I’ve indicated “no cilantro” in my online order.
- Unappreciative motorists who don’t wave a thank-you when we allow them to merge in front of us. What kind of entitled chucklehead doesn’t acknowledge such a courtesy?
- Pedestrians who make no attempt to hurry despite knowing they’re holding you up when they cross on a red light.
We can’t fix the cesspit of political extremism that defines and divides this world. And we can’t erase stupidity from social media. But we can at least hustle through an intersection when we’re knowingly holding up someone who has the right of way.
