The holiday shopping season is here once again. And this year, surveillance and espionage products have made it to the top of a surprising number of wish lists in the guise of digital home assistants. The devices already have brought microphones into as many rooms of our houses as we're willing to allow. Now, many of them come equipped with cameras as well. Despite concerns about the threat to privacy that earlier generations of the devices have posed — one product from Amazon's Alexa line carried the unfortunate name of Dox — enhanced video capability appears to be the next big thing in digital home assistants.
In the grand scheme of things, the jump from audio to video is a marginal advancement in the gadgets' ability to collect information. But for those thinking about following the products to their next frontier, this is a good opportunity to explore the relationship between service and surveillance and to take sober stock of the risks inherent with home assistant devices.
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