Please don’t support Amazon from creating another network-effect product that creates vendor lock-in, and privacy issues. Convenience should not be the end-all goal, as the ad blatantly states, but instead interoperability and open-protocols.
For who? Even as a tech savvy person, that is ALL I want. I used to tinker around with home projects, nowadays I want things that work with no fuss. I don't want to play IT support desk for my family, I want their stuff to work.
Convenience is exactly what people want who don't understand technology but want to use it for benefit.
If we lived in an world where the most convenient products also protected users' privacy then maybe we wouldn't be having this quibble.
Despite being technically-savvy, and ready to hack away at systems for max configuration; I too prefer convenience for a lot of things. That’s the magic of modern life, you can save time on so many “complicated” things.
Disclaimer: I don’t use Amazon Echo specifically.
Anyways, could you provide some concrete examples of products where you were able to obtain such privacy and security guarantees with minimal friction?
If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.
Thread is what you are talking about. It's awesome.
A good doorknob is ready-at-hand: it's just about invisible to me until it breaks and, suddenly, it's present and bright in my mind. I've been in the woods and become unsafe: everything around becomes suddenly, viscerally present. That's not a feeling I want often. But individual things I attend to (like watching what I eat or trying to ID a bird by its song) make the world much more colorful, and make me feel more a part of it. Plus, as the comments here suggest, immediate convenience can lead to downstream perils (e.g. in terms of data collection).