Today, the good people over at Gizmodo reported that apparently Amazon is building a smart fridge that knows what you eat, and I couldn’t help but think to myself that one day, someone is going to regret having made all this shit… But likely not as much as those who will line up to buy this monstrosity of privacy invasion.
To be fair, however, Amazon’s smart fridge concept, affectionately dubbed “Project Pulse,” does sound ambitious in its own right. Powered by the same computer-vision technology that Amazon is currently employing in its cashier-less stores, Project Pulse would have the ability to keep stock of your food inventory as well as notify you when a certain product’s shelf life has passed. Pulse is also designed to give its users certain health recommendations for food to eat—which I am sure some people will love as much as others will hate, and finally, help users reorder food in the event that things need to be replaced.
Project Pulse represents the latest addition to Amazon’s fairly invasive approach towards gathering data from your home. Whether we want to look at the original Ring Doorbell, which has now evolved into an automated miniature sentry drone that flies around your house, to newer things such as Astro, a mobile home assistant designed to know your home’s floor plan, Amazon’s strikingly invasive grasp on the home privacy of its customers is one that has been the subject of criticism and discussion amongst myriad media commentators.
All the same, I think it is worth noting that rarely does customer data that a corporation use gets used to the disadvantage of the customer. Sure, there are some extraordinary instances of data being used to a detrimental, unethical, or even abusive extent. For example, you can look no further than social media. But in most cases—for most businesses—the data that is gathered on their customers is rarely used to their customers’ detriment. But if Amazon is positioning itself to gather all of this data, and clearly people are fearful of that, it is because someone gets hurt. Just not the people that everyone thinks of. While the average customer is likely going to be fine leaving their data with Amazon, the people that get screwed over are businesses.
It has already been discussed by a few different sources that Amazon will use data from sellers on its platform to provide products that either directly compete, or outright replace the original product being sold. This is to say that if Amazon is willing to eat their own sellers, then the reason why Amazon is trying to put a smart fridge in your home is that this is Amazon’s biggest play at coming for your local grocery store—and when they do that, it’ll be game over.
The biggest problem with online grocery delivery is the wait. But if a logistical company was able to obtain the data on when to send groceries to be delivered, they would have exact calculations on not just when, say, a box of blueberries went bad—but they would also have data on how many times in the last several months they went bad, as well as how many times the person who bought the blueberries ate through them before their expiration date. With this information, Amazon can determine pretty precisely whether or not someone will need a fresh box of blueberries sent to them every week, and could even time the delivery so that a fresh box arrived by the time the old box was eaten.
With that type of capability, you could render grocery trips obsolete. While many households set a weekly grocery list, others simply go off of when it is time to get more. Whether your fall into the former group or the latter, having the ability to automate your purchases, by effectively bringing your kitchen into Amazon’s logistical framework places the corporation at a major logistical advantage over just about any grocery store in America.
This is why I will leave you with this closing thought: As we approach this corner in technological development, almost some 30 years after the inception of Amazon, it should all start to become more clear as to just what the scope of Amazon’s ambitions is. I think that for the last decade and a half, many have mistakenly made the notion of thinking that Amazon wants to live in a world where they have no competition—but I do not think it is that simple. I think what it is, is that Amazon’s greater desire lies with being frictionless, which requires more control over more disparate pieces. Sure, like most businesses, Amazon wants to sell people the things that they want. What project pulse reveals, however, is that unlike most businesses, Amazon wants to sell people the things that they want before they even know they want them. (image and info via Gizmodo)
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