Luke Alison Unessay and Artist Statement

Virtual Assistants –> Virtual Spies

---

Link to my presentation via Yuja: Luke Alison Unessay

For this assignment I chose the topic of virtual assistants and the risk of privacy invasion that comes with owning them. I focused on Google’s “Google Home” and Amazon’s “Alexa” for two reasons: They are the two most popular virtual assistants on the market, and I have had multiple interactions with each device. The reason I chose this topic is because I have experienced some remarkable coincidences with targeted adds that made my head spin. An example of this is a time when I saw an advertisement on my phone for a very specific type of shoe only moments after mentioning the shoe in a conversation with a friend. Before this project I was oblivious to why/how this was happening, but I learned that it was because of the “virtual spy” in the room that we call Alexa. These spies are constantly listening and collecting personal data about individuals for its given company’s profit. Companies like Google and Amazon are way smarter than we know, and they have more information about us than we can imagine, thanks to their virtual spies. This can be frightening for some people as their privacy has been/is being stolen from them without them even knowing it. Although Google and Amazon do not have ill-intentions with this data, others might. This brings concern about others having the ability to access this vast amount of data, threatening individuals’ privacy around the world.