Amazon's dangerous new acquisition

This merger isn’t just about controlling the robot-vacuum industry, or even about smart-home devices. Owning Roomba would give the world’s most dominant spy-tech maker yet another portal into our homes and lives. It could map where we live, what we own, and what it should be selling to its hundreds of millions of captured customers.

Amazon got its towering place in home tech the same way it is expanding it now—by buying other companies. It bought the voice-assistant start-up Evi Technologies in 2013 to help create what would eventually become Alexa, the voice of Echo and by far the leading smart-speaker voice assistant. Then, to extend its eyes and ears into people’s homes, Amazon bought two start-ups: the camera maker Blink in 2017 and a doorbell company called Ring in 2018. Today, Ring accounts for an estimated 40 percent of all video doorbells installed in America.

These devices have given Amazon incredible access to people’s daily lives. The company has a documented history of leveraging the data its vast home-tech network captures in order to grow—and to expand its monopoly power. For example, Amazon has for years used Alexa’s algorithm to steer customers toward Amazon’s own products. Ring monitors and records every interaction with a customer’s doorbell, including every doorbell buzz and every movement in proximity to the outside of the door, and congressional investigators found that “acquiring Ring and Blink was in part to expand and reinforce [Amazon’s] market power for its other business lines.”