Amazon Fire – smart phone

If you don’t want to believe us here at Whiteout Press, just ask the non-political folks at ComputerWorld.com. Last month, the tech experts published a warning to American electronics consumers. Their headline and subhead sum it up, ‘Why you shouldn’t buy the Amazon Fire phone – The Fire is optimized for spying on you.’

The authors detailed how the new smart phone, released by Amazon last month, had some amazing features such as a seemingly 3D touch-screen interface. Other ‘Wow!’ features include the phone’s built-in ability to watch, listen and monitor the movements of the phone’s owner. Designed to make purchasing easy and convenient, the Amazon Fire rapidly learns everything there is to know about you.

Even more creepy, it continues to learn about you as its microphone and camera record the things you do, the places you go and the people you interact with. And it catalogs and saves every bit of it for ongoing and future use. The researchers at ComputerWorld.com came to the following conclusion about the Amazon Fire phone, “It’s the most effective device ever sold for harvesting the personal data from its owner.”

How it works

According to the report from ComputerWorld, ‘The Fire phone has a dedicated Firefly button which, when pressed, activates both camera and microphone to recognize whatever it can. Another is that if that object or content is available on Amazon, the phone will facilitate your purchase of it.’ According to Amazon, Fire can recognize over 100 million objects. That’s the key to the application’s popularity and success. But the report’s authors prove that sales and customer convenience aren’t the only motives.

‘Here’s a shocking fact about Firefly,’ the ComputerWorld report reads, ‘When the Firefly button is pressed, a picture and audio clip plus GPS coordinates are all uploaded to Amazon’s servers every time. Amazon retains the data on their servers. If you want it to recognize a song, it still uploads a picture. If you want to recognize a product, it still uploads an audio clip. What is promoted as a user benefit, one-button for recognizing anything, is in fact the opening of a window to let Amazon into your life.’

Another eerie feature of the Amazon Fire phone is its 3D visual interface. Not surprisingly, the tech experts wanted to know how it worked. As it turns out, much of the fascinating imagery is only achieved because the smart phone always knows exactly where your face is in relation to the phone’s screen. In short, it’s always watching you. The report’s author writes, ‘Let me be clear: I’m not accusing Amazon of taking pictures of your face. If I had to guess, I would guess they are not doing this.’

‘But there are three things that concern me about all this,’ the tech publication concedes, ‘The first is that, to the best of my knowledge, Amazon hasn’t publicly promised that they do not and will never photograph users’ faces in this way. The second is that without such a promise, they could turn on that capability at any time in the future. And third, Amazon hasn’t spelled out exactly how they prevent hackers and government spy agencies and third-party app makers from doing this.’

Jackpot! See the Whiteout Press article above about TrapWire – the program that secretly taps into every single camera and microphone in the world to record and monitor the movements and conversations of every human on Earth.

Amazon Fire TV

First, Amazon is hired to create the federal governments spy center. Second, the company releases a smart phone that can record the audio and video of everything going on around it. Now, our friends at Natural News have exposed Amazon for another spy device – the Amazon Fire TV.

The opening sentence of the Natural News warning two weeks ago raises the same curious facts about Amazon as detailed above. ‘Amazon.com is building the CIA’s new $600 million data center,’ the publication writes, ‘At the same time Amazon.com is building this massive cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA, the company is also shipping millions of Fire TV set-top devices to customers who are placing them in their private homes.’ Coincidence?

Never turns ‘Off’

Natural News author Mike Adams explains, “There’s something about it that always struck me as odd: it has no power button. There’s no power button on the remote, and there’s no power button on the box. It turns out there’s no way to power the device off except for unplugging it.” He goes on to say, “So far, you might not be convinced this is anything to write home about, but there’s much more to this story.”

The account goes on to report, ‘What starts to make this really interesting is when you realize these devices are linked to your identity before they’re shipped to you. Ever notice that when you power on your Fire TV device, it already knows who you are? Your entire library of video purchases on Amazon.com is already available, and those purchases are of course linked to your credit card, which is linked to your social security number, which is linked to your identity.’

The interesting discoveries don’t stop there either. The author writes, “There is a built-in microphone on the Fire TV remote. When you click the search button, your voice is recorded and uploaded to Amazon.com servers where it is analyzed by Amazon cloud computing applications – the same kind of thing Amazon is building for the CIA.”

This isn’t the first time Whiteout Press has warned readers about their computers and appliances spying on them in their homes. Read the 2011 article, ‘Corporations caught spying in Homes’ and the 2012 article, ‘Feds spying on you through your Appliances’.