This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 7th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Amazon is listening and they're watching you too.

And the massive company is increasingly turning that data over to police.

The problems with such an arrangement are manifold.

Cato Policy analyst Matthew Feeney comments.

Cato Policy analyst Matthew Feeney comments. Kato Policy analyst Matthew Fini comments.

People are creeped out a little bit at the notion of putting a little box in their homes that

will listen to conversations in their homes.

There have been some cases of people accidentally calling friends

and sending recordings of their conversations

in their own home to other people.

But you argue in a recent piece that as far as Amazon and the Alexa device

and the other technologies that they're developing, the issue with surveillance

being provided by the private sector may actually be worse than a lot of people fear.

Yes, I think many people are used to thinking of

Amazon as the giant tech company that is really good at sending them timely and cost efficient deliveries, but recent news

reveals that actually Amazon is also very interested in getting into the surveillance business.

So last month the ECLU acquired documents

showing that police in Orlando, Florida

and Washington, County, Oregon, have been using recognition, which is recognition with a K.

This is Amazon's facial recognition technology and this is being marketed to law enforcement and is very powerful and has the

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