The surveillance + landlord thing is triggering me
Surveillance isn’t the biggest issue with this.
Amazon’s endgoal will be to become a middleman for landlord management services. Everything currently run by private landlords operating through local and regional real estate agencies or property management agencies will become run by Amazon.
This is intended to be a disruptive product, much like many before it, to disrupt an industry and change the game within that industry completely. Think what Uber did to taxis in terms of killing off thousands of small businesses.
Now, I don’t give a shit about small businesses but I’m damn well telling you that everything run through Amazon will be a fucking nightmare. Once their service gets big enough it will just take over, you literally won’t be able to get a property without going through amazon services unlike the properties you often can quietly rent in cash currently.
You will never ever be able to keep anything from your landlords ever again. Want a property? Amazon will know everything about you and your tenancy in previous properties. They will 100% be passing that information onto the landlord you’re applying to rent with.
Tenants unions? Amazon will be a monster force busting them up.
The future of the intended goal they have in this market is real bad news.
Amazon’s endgoal will be to become a middleman for landlord management services. Everything currently run by private landlords operating through local and regional real estate agencies or property management agencies will become run by Amazon.
Yeah I’d probably bet money on them coming out with some all-in-one web platform for landlords to use for charging rent, maintenance requests, etc. Buy out AppFolio and RealPage (I struggle to think of any other property management software that has a sizeable share of the market) and just rebrand as Amazon Properties or something. Prime users get 3% off their monthly rent!!
Exactly what concerns me. It’s a messy market that is fully of small private local businesses that is ripe for a tech “disruptive product” to lay waste to it all and turn it all into 1-3 mega companies. That’s the formula for recognising markets where these kinds of disruptive products can work.
I’m starting to think that this one Mao guy was actually a very nice dude
I dunno… if we’re going for the cyberpunk aesthetic they’re probably working on a way to upload your consciousness or hook your brain up to something so you can become a sort of sentient processor or server.
Amazon claims in its press release that it’s taken the steps necessary to protect the privacy of residents. There’s just one issue that Amazon doesn’t address in its announcement: the Drop In feature on Amazon Echo devices.
Drop In allows one Echo user to connect to another Echo user’s device, as long as that user has granted them permission. They don’t even need to be in the same household. As long as both devices are connected to the internet, Drop In functions like a Zoom call. With this feature enabled, you will be able to hear anything within the range of the device, see anything on the other side, in the case of an Echo Show, and also transmit your voice or video feed to the other device.
“All the mass surveillance concerns of regular Alexa, but now your landlord can take part in the fun, too!”
It feels like while the rest of us were reading dystopian sci fi and cyberpunk with a growing horror at corporate driven, technology enabled indentured servitude and feudalism these fuckheads were taking notes.
