Alexa is Amazon’s always-listening voice assistant, marketed as a smart home convenience. Behind the marketing, it’s a surveillance device that records, stores, and analyzes what you say—feeding Amazon’s vast data operations. It’s a tool for selling more products, gathering more personal information, and embedding Amazon deeper into your daily life.
Amazon is rated High Impact because its harms are systemic and interlocking.
Environmental Harm: Delivery fleets, aviation cargo, and data centers generate massive emissions and plastic waste, while public pledges mask lobbying against climate regulation.
Human Rights Violations: Workers face surveillance, injury-level quotas, and unsafe delivery speeds. Migrant workers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere face wage theft and coercion.
Military & Conflict Complicity: AWS is central to surveillance states. Project Nimbus embeds Amazon in Israel’s occupation and war crimes, supplying AI and data services to its military and government.
The result: consumer spending that powers a machine which entrenches inequality, accelerates climate collapse, and sustains state violence worldwide.