There Aren’t a Lot of Reasons to Get Excited About a New Amazon Smartphone
“It’s not a consumer device company that takes privacy very seriously,” Gamero-Garrido says. Given that people use smartphones far more than Alexa or a Kindle, he says an Amazon smartphone today would “significantly increase the scale of potential privacy breaches.”
Gamero-Garrido thinks Amazon could use Transformer as a data collection tool to understand how people use its devices, build its advertising network and compete with Alphabet and Meta, which are under regulatory review in the European Union and California.
The Fire TV approach could notably help achieve this. This is Amazon’s TV streaming platform integrated into a third-party TV (or via a dongle); Even though you may not have purchased an Amazon TV powered by Fire TV, the data collected by the operating system still belongs to the company.
“Whether they succeed with this phone add-on, or eventually use a similar model where they install their operating system on other phones or ‘thin’ phones built by third parties, it has the same effect,” he says. “Ultimately, Amazon centralizes all network traffic through its own infrastructure so it can improve its advertising business.”
If Amazon can detect when someone is sick by the sound of their voice, then it can recommend that you purchase specific cold medications from Amazon Health – this is an actual patent owned by Amazon. If it’s now enabled on a device you carry everywhere, Gamero-Garrido claims it can listen to more of your conversations and serve you better ads.
Even with its past regressions, customers have shown general acceptance of Amazon’s hardware, says Kassem Fawaz, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies consumer device security and privacy.
“I think when it comes to products, unfortunately, consumers prioritize utility and price over privacy,” Fawaz wrote in an email to WIRED.
The accelerator here might be Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, who joined the company in 2023. Panay helped transform Microsoft’s Surface line of computers into an aspirational hardware brand with his “pumped” and emotionally charged speeches.
Panay has already brought this kind of energy to a few Amazon hardware announcements, like the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, although it hasn’t matched the Surface’s success. If Amazon actually makes a smartphone, it will need to generate a lot of passion to attract customers.
“If anyone can do it, it will be Panos,” says Jeronimo. “For this, I have total confidence. He is the ideal person for this type of initiative.”
