I have an Amazon Echo Dot, a/k/a “Alexa.” I got Alexa during a period of time where my neurological symptoms were so bad that I was having a lot of difficulty reading from a computer screen.

Even though I have been better for almost a yeat, I still have Alexa, and I still think that she is fantastic. She has greatly cut down on the number of times that I have started to make tea and then forgotten to drink it. It’s much faster to ask her the weather than to look it up on my phone. She can turn the light off from across the room (so I no longer need to regret the fact that I didn’t think to ask the electrician to install a second light switch on the other side of the room).

Everyone warns me that Alexa might be a spy. But why single Alexa out? Let me tell you about other potential spies.

  1. Your cell phone has a microphone and probably at least one camera. It connects to nearby cell towers without you even asking it to. It is well-established that when it is on, your phone is certainly revealing your location to your phone company. It is likely that your phone is also revealing your location to the company that wrote its operating system. Your cell phone might be listening to you right now via the microphone. It’s hard to prove that it isn’t. A friend countered this argument by saying that if you turned your phone off and put it in a potato chip bag and if the phone’s battery level didn’t go down, then the phone was not fruitlessly searching for cell phone signal while “off,” in which case it was not spying. This just means that the phone is not constantly trying to stream your life to some mothership. It might save the data and then send it once it has a connection.

  2. Your laptop. Also has a microphone and a camera. Also frequently connects to the internet. Maybe that is why your hard drive is always full and your battery runs down faster than you expect. Maybe ps -A is lying to you.

  3. Just about any other device that is hooked up to your network. Could my stereo be spying on me? Unlikely. It probably doesn’t have a built-in microphone, and you would only connect the external microphone if you needed to recalibrate the speakers. (It is so cool. You put the microphone where you sit, and then the stereo emits various tones, and it adjusts the levels based on what the microphone hears coming from the speakers.) But if you think that Alexa is a rat, there is no reason not to take a critical look at that Kindle.

  4. The cable box. Why is the box so big and so heavy and so hot if all it does is convert the signals coming out of the co-ax cable to HDMI? That sounds like the work of a dongle, not a large box. Oh, it’s a DVR, too? You mean that it can store many hours of audio and video? How much do you trust Comcast?

  5. Your cable modem. Have you opened it up and looked for surveillance equipment?

  6. Anything. Maybe that weird gift is spying on you (powered via watch batteries), and someone comes within 30 feet of your home every day and grabs the data off it via Bluetooth.