GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY TODAY

Here are the top 100 websites by search traffic in the US and worldwide. In total, they get almost 31 billion visits per month.

Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, "Are you crazy?"
Yet that's essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it's hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley's next frontier.
Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.
So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.
You can listen to your own Alexa archive here. Let me know what you unearth.
For as much as we fret about snooping apps on our computers and phones, our homes are where the rubber really hits the road for privacy. It's easy to rationalize away concerns by thinking a single smart speaker or appliance couldn't know enough to matter. But across the increasingly connected home, there's a brazen data grab going on, and there are few regulations, watchdogs or common-sense practices to keep it in check.
Let's not repeat the mistakes of Facebook in our smart homes. Any personal data that's collected can and will be used against us. An obvious place to begin: Alexa, stop recording us.
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"Eavesdropping" is a sensitive word for Amazon, which has battled lots of consumer confusion about when

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Google Earth




Evidence is mounting that Amazon's second headquarters could end up in an area of Northern Virginia known as Data Center Alley, or, as one author described it, the "bull's-eye of America's internet."
It's estimated that more than 70% of the world's internet traffic flows through Data Center Alley.
Amazon recently put the headquarters of its cloud business just 3 miles from the proposed HQ2 site.
Amazon is also planning to build a 44-acre data-center campus nearby.


Evidence is mounting that Amazon could select Northern Virginia - and specifically a site near Dulles International Airport - as the location of its next headquarters, dubbed HQ2.

AmazonAmazon is breaking into physical retail in a new way.