This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day.
You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening.
Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are:
* This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to)
* That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands)
* That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely)
* That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.)
* That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream
* That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above
* That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media
Fucking. Seriously?
If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.
You do realise that it doesn't need to be streaming 48kHz 24 bit audio back up don't you? It could be something really low, like GSM which is 13.2 kbit/s. AMR is even lower! So to stream audio at the threshold where it is still legible, it doesn't need masses and masses of data as you presume.
You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening.
Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are:
* This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to)
* That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands)
* That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely)
* That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.)
* That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream
* That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above
* That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media
Fucking. Seriously?
If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.