Does Amazon Fire phone pose a major privacy threat?

Amazon’s Fire phone might be the biggest privacy invasion ever and no one noticed, reads the headline on Venture Beat .

According to the site, the offender is the device’s Firefly feature which allows you to use your camera to recognise things in the real world from QR and bar codes, movies, music, etc. It is being touted as the ‘ultimate shopping weapon’ and brings augmented reality to a whole new level.

Basically the feature allows users to scan and identify products and media  just by pointing a camera at something. Once you snap a picture of a product you like, the smartphone will show you where to buy it from. It can even direct you to more information about the product, such as pulling up a Wikipedia entry on a painting. The feature will also let you snap bar codes, email addresses and phone numbers. The new device introduces audio recognition as well.

But according to VentureBeat,. this feature poses a serious privacy threat since the app is using both the camera and microphone.

More importantly, if you wish to delete photos from Firefly, you can, but if you forget, Amazon will use these “photos and recordings to enhance its recognition system,” notes the report.

And while that is good news,that Amazon won’t be storing your personal pictures in the Firefly system, it should be pointed that even then Amazon will get access to a whole bunch of photos of real-life objects, from movies to posters to books that come under Firefly. And if the phone does fairly well, it’s still a lot of new data for the cloud-computing and e-commerce giant.

Also the report points out that even if it’s not storing your personal photos in Firefly, Amazon will “get more metadata”, via these pictures and thus “unprecedented insight into who you are, what you own, where you go, what you do, who’s important in your life, what you like, and, probably, what you might be most likely to buy.”

While it sounds a little alarmist to say the Amazon’s smartphone might be the biggest privacy violation ever, the consequences of Firefly definitely need more introspection. Let’s not forget that on Android, we have many apps that demand access to our network settings, photos, contacts, etc, even when the app has no need for any of this data.

On iOS users can restrict which app gets access to your photos or contacts via the privacy settings. On Android once you install an app, it usually ends up getting access to a lot of your settings.

So where privacy is concerned, Amazon is not the first company where not all is clear.  Of course, how much data the Fire phone ends up provide to Amazon will depend on its success as well.