Alexa Really is Listening

Something happened this morning that made me angry, nervous, and seriously creeped out.  I want to tell you about it, but first here's a little background.

Back in 2015 or early 2016 I bought an Amazon Echo when they first came out.  We still have the same one.  In case you're not familiar with the Echo, it's a small cylinder shaped electronic device that you use to access Alexa, Amazon's personal assistant.  Once it's set up you can give it voice commands by saying things like "Alexa, what's the weather for today?" or "Alexa, set a timer for 40 minutes" or "Alexa, what's the news for today?"  You can ask it just about anything and usually it can give you a pretty reasonable answer.

Alexa works by using your Amazon login to access all the voice processing programs and search facilities running in the Amazon data centers worldwide.  As soon as you plug it in and link it to your Amazon account it instantly knows a lot about you.  You can enable ordering on Amazon and tell it things like "Alexa, reorder toilet paper" or "Alexa, add whole wheat flour to my shopping list."  It already knows everything you have ever ordered from Amazon and you can reorder those items with just one voice command.  At first it was just a curiosity, but eventually we started to use it for small tasks like kitchen timers, getting the weather for today, or finding the capital of Montana.

At the time we bought the Echo this was pretty amazing technology to have in your home.  I decided to find out how it works.  Basically, the Echo listens for a wake-up word and then sends the audio of whatever comes next to the voice recognition systems running at Amazon before sending your command to whatever needs to act on it for you.  The wake-up word for the Echo is "Alexa."  As soon as you say Alexa it lights up a blue bar at the top of the device and listens for whatever comes next.  After your command has been processed by Amazon a result is sent back to the Echo and a friendly female voice tells you the result.  Pretty simple stuff when you think of it, but it's not quite that cut and dried.

As soon as the Echo with Alexa was introduced there were concerns about privacy.  Amazon assured everyone that they were not capturing all the conversations happening in your home and sending them to their data centers.  The said that the only time Alexa is listening to you is when you say the wake-up word.

That's reassuring but it's impossible if you really think about it.  Alexa has to be listening to everything constantly in order to listen for the wake-up word.  There's no way around that.  For nine years now people have been suspicious of Alexa.  Amazon has vehemently insisted that Alexa was not actively listening to us all the time.  What happened this morning says something entirely different.

This morning we were sitting in our living room having some morning coffee.  My wife was browsing through Facebook on her phone and saw an ad for a sale at a company called Sak.  There was a purse she was interested in.  Alexa was in the next room and within earshot.  She mentioned that she really liked a particular purse and she showed me a picture of it on her phone.  We discussed it for a minute while she rationalized the purchase.

Now a little more background for you.  I have never ordered anything from Sak.  I have never even visited their web site.  As far as I know I have never ordered a purse online.  We have separate computers and our own phones and she has never used any of my devices to communicate with Sak.  I don't have any connection whatsoever with Sak.  Alexa uses my Amazon account, but my wife has never asked Alexa a question about Sak or even about purses in general.  My wife has her own Amazon account and never uses mine.

What happened next was truly creepy.  My wife got up to go refill her coffee and I immediately received an email from Sak telling me about their sale.  Remember, I have no connection of any kind with Sak.  I think my odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of a company I have never had any contact with before sending me a random email about the very sale my wife and I had just been discussing.

I thought about it for a minute and I came to the conclusion that Alexa really is listening all the time and is parsing what she hears into marketing leads for Amazon to sell.  Think about it for a minute.  Amazon could make a lot of money sending sales leads gleaned from supposedly private conversations to various companies who sell the products being discussed.  That, combined with all the information that Amazon already knows about us, would be very valuable.

An even more troubling scenario would be if, instead of sales leads, they were parsing random discussions about a crappy president or a discussion of how we wish a big meteor would land in Washington and take out the capitol or the White House.  A government agency could subpoena this data and use it to proactively suppress people who were perceived as unfriendly to the current administration.  It could happen and Amazon would most likely just hand over everything rather than getting into a legal pissing match with a President with the maturity of a seventh grader and the mental capacity of a houseplant.

What happened this morning has really made me think.  I'm angry that Amazon has apparently lied to us.  I'm nervous that it's possible that the government already has knowledge of the many private conversations had between us and our friends.  I'm leaning strongly toward unplugging our Echo and landfilling it, but that raises the question "What if Alexa is innocent and it was really the blender? Or the TV? Or maybe even the microwave?"  All I know is that one of our devices ratted us out and I think it's most likely Alexa.

UPDATE 3/26/25

Amazon announced last week that Alexa enabled devices would be storing EVERYTHING they hear to the Amazon cloud and that information would be used to train their large model AI system.  Alexa will no longer wait to hear its alert word before starting to process what it hears.  Now it will capture everything it hears and send it to the cloud.  Everything.

After hearing them admit what I already suspected, I unregistered all of our Alexa enabled devices and powered them down.  This morning I watched the city's garbage collectors dump them into their garbage truck and haul them all away with our kitchen trash and everything else we threw away last week.  My next step will be to wean myself off Amazon completely over the course of the next few months.

My Pizza Journey

I couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pizza.  Really, really good pizza. It seemed like whenever I made it at home it was good, but never really excellent.  I found this ironic because I have owned two Italian restaurants that served pizza.  The first place served a ton of pizza and we had a huge customer base that came in just for the pizza.  It was probably the best pizza I have ever tasted.  Crispy thin crust and many items that could be ordered on it.  The pizzas were topped with some mozzarella and pecorino Romano cheese.  Absolutely delicious.  I decided that this was what I wanted to make at home.

After experimenting with different dough recipes, sauces, and toppings I still couldn't quite get it right and for some time I resorted to using Trader Joe's rectangular flatbread for the crust.  I decided that I needed to get my shit together and figure out how to make pizza like what we served in the restaurant.  I did some less than thorough research on the web and decided that what I wanted to make was Neapolitan pizza.  As a retired professional chef I should have known a lot about pizza already but I didn't.

As luck would have it, I have a friend who was even more obsessed with pizza than me.  He had been experimenting with pizza for quite some time before I decided to get serious about it and he gave me a ton of pointers.

My friend had built a wood burning pizza oven in his back yard out of fire bricks and used it to develop his technique and dough recipe.  We don't have much of a back yard and I didn't want to build an oven in the front yard.  We have a small dog with limited common sense who would almost certainly become entangled in the oven or possibly even wander into it while it was ripping hot.  So the front yard was out.  The brick ovens use a ton of wood to get up to the required temperature of 900 degrees, so cooking even one small pizza would be prohibitively expensive.  The oven on my stove in the house only went to 550 degrees so it wasn't hot enough.

By this time my friend was almost totally immersed in learning the pizza craft and he had purchased a small tabletop propane powered pizza oven.  I wasn't excited about it but I bought one too.  And a propane tank.  And propane.  And a portable table to put it on.  And two pizza peels -- one for launching the pizza into the oven and another one just for turning the pizza while in the oven.  And an infrared thermometer.  And an oven brush.  And a digital scale. And a special pizza cutting knife.  My wonderful and very understanding wife bought me some imported pepperoni and Italian olive oil.  As you can imagine, this project was getting very expensive.

While I was waiting on all the necessary pieces to arrive, I went to look for flour.   Neapolitan pizza requires "00" flour.  This is not the flour you find at the grocery store unless it's an Italian grocery store.  We don't have one of those in Omaha, Nebraska, so it was another Amazon order.  Caputo makes a flour for pizzas cooked at a higher temperature such as Neapolitan, so I ordered a small bag of that and some Caputo pizza yeast.  It was expensive.  By now I figured that I would have to make my own Neapolitan pizzas for about 15 years and we would need to eat about 20 of them each week just to break even on the whole deal.

While all the pieces were coming together I was reading every Facebook pizza group I could find to learn more.  Eventually I decided that I needed a really good pizza book.  I had seen references to "The Pizza Bible" by Tony Gemignani so I ordered a copy and began to read it.

Eventually I was ready to make my first pizza.  The dough is more complicated than you might think.  You have to make it one day and let it sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours before shaping it into pizzas.  I won't bore you with the details of making good Neapolitan pizza dough, but I'll tell you that it's complicated and it isn't easy at first.  There's a lot of technique involved.

On the day I was finally going to make pizza I got all my ingredients together and set up the oven on the front porch.  The oven fired up pretty easily and in about half an hour it was at a little over 900 degrees.  So far so good.

I got one of the dough balls and after a few minutes I was able to shape it into a somewhat round circle on the counter.  I put on the sauce and the toppings.  The next task was to get it onto the pizza peel and then take it outside and slide it into the oven.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  Neapolitan pizza dough is a little sticky so getting the peel under it was very difficult.  By the time I got it onto the peel it was nowhere near round anymore.  I took it outside and figured it would just slide off the peel onto the pizza stone in the oven.  I figured wrong.  Despite my best efforts, the pizza was sticking to the peel.

If you've ever used an oven running at 900 degrees you probably know that once something is in there you can't just reach in for a second and adjust it.  The wave of heat that was coming out of the front of the oven was so intense that it would simply melt the flesh right off your arm in a few seconds.  You have to get it where you want it on the first try.  For pizzas if you happen to get it a little over to one side you can wait about 30 seconds and possibly reposition it with the turning peel.  If you get it too close the the burners in the rear then your pizza will burst into flames in less than 5 seconds.

After some amount of struggling I got the pizza off the peel and onto the stone.  It was no longer round and about a quarter of the toppings had fallen off in the oven and burst into flame.  I was able to put out the flames from the toppings, but by this time the part of the crust in the back of the oven was on fire.  I rotated the pizza several times before pulling it out of the oven.  It was by this time a smoldering black thing shaped like a deflated football.  Not exactly what I was hoping for.  My wife was trying to be encouraging, but she was getting hungry and was not too happy about seeing our dinner in that condition.  I cooked three more pizzas that day and some parts of them were edible, but the whole effort was pretty much a disaster.  Back to the drawing board.

After some more research I made several more attempts and eventually made some pretty good pizzas.  Not stellar, but pretty good.  The thing about Neapolitan pizza is that it's cooked from start to finish for only about 90 seconds.  This leaves the edges thick, puffy, and bready and the center thin, barely cooked, and limp.  and you can't load up a Neapolitan pizza with lots of toppings and cheese.  They usually have a little tomato sauce and only one or two ingredients plus cheese.  Less is more.  This is not what I was looking for.

Over the next year I tried my hand at Detroit style pizza.  If you haven't tried Detroit pizza then you should.  There's a guy here who converted an old school bus into a food truck specializing in Detroit pizza.  It was wildly successful and he later opened a small pizza restaurant for takeout orders of his Detroit pizza.

Detroit pizza requires a special pan.  The one I bought is and 8"x10" heavy carbon steel pan with slightly slanted sides.  It is made specifically for making Detroit pizza and it is very expensive.  On Detroit pizza you use brick cheese.  It is not available anywhere in Omaha so you have to order it.  What makes Detroit pizza so good is that you use a lot of butter or shortening in the pan and spread cheese all the way to the edges of the pan.  As it cooks the cheese makes a caramelized "crust" along the edges.  It's delicious, but the crust is thick and bready so you can't eat too much of it in one sitting.  The dough is similar to focaccia.

Recently I discovered a pizza dough called piadina.  It's apparently very popular in Rome.  It's different in that it uses milk instead of water and for leavening it has a little baking soda in it instead of yeast.  Once the dough is mixed you let it rest for 20 minutes and then roll it into balls.  You let the balls rest another 20 minutes and then you roll it into crusts with a rolling pin.  Each crust is cooked on top of the stove in a frying pan with a little olive oil until it is lightly browned.  This whole process for 4 crusts takes less than an hour from start to finish.

Once the crusts are cooled you can top them with whatever you like and finish them in the oven for a little while just like you normally would cook pizza.  This yields a thin and crispy crust that doesn't wilt while still remaining pleasingly tender.  This is what I was looking for all along.

My friend who built the stone oven in his yard has made his pizza obsession into a successful business.  He and his partner converted a trailer into a mobile pizza kitchen and they serve excellent Neapolitan pizza all over town.  I wouldn't be surprised if their next move was to open a brick and mortar location.  I just hope they open in an area where their customer base lives and works.

So that's about it.  Now I keep a few piadina crusts in the refrigerator so we can whip up a great pizza in about 15 minutes when we want one.  I'm thinking about selling my propane pizza oven and all the accessories since I may not use it again.  Then again...you never know.