Comment by doubtfuluser

I have the feeling, that the paper is flawed and missing an important experiment. All their results seem to rely on skills being used. There is indeed a need then for Amazon to prevent user tracking in skills (like for example Apple does and requires consent by the user). But to come to the conclusion that Amazon shares the data with advertisers I would have expected an experiment with eliminating skills as a reason and just having personas interact with Alexa core services. I guess just from shopping questions or general knowledge questions a lot of information for ad targeting could be inferred. If that’s however not influencing ads served when no skills are used, then it’s not necessarily Amazon directly sharing the information, but the skills being able to do so using Amazons provided tooling.

That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.