People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

> When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies?

How should they know? Genuinely asking. Yeah WE know, we've known forever because we're the people who make this shit, both professionally and in our spare time. We know the costs associated with making these little magic devices, and we know the ongoing cost of powering them. Your average consumer does not. Not only do they not know, they do not care, until they feel their privacy is being eroded by it.

Instead of being mad at people for taking a product advertised to them at face value to just be a useful thing for them to use, and not something actively designed to spy on them and then use that collected information to bombard them with ads, why don't we just say to companies: hey, it's no longer acceptable to sell loss-leader products that perform a handful of user-friendly functions that also then double as privacy violations and harass customers with ads?

If we kill surveillance capitalism, not only do we de-fang the advertising industry which is actively making every tech product on the face of the earth worse to suit it's purposes, not only do we permanently end the privacy issue on the side of users, we also reduce climate threatening emissions and hideous power waste that is required to make all this atrocious shit work.

And you might say "well they SHOULD care!" and yeah, I kinda agree, and also I recognize that people have a lot of shit they already have to care about, and frankly, I don't think they should have to care about this. I don't think you should have to worry if your new TV is spying on you, I just think you should be able to buy a fuckin' TV, and take it home, and plug some shit into it, and watch TV. I think that's a better world to strive for than all the consumer awareness we can muster. I am perfectly able to, but don't WANT to have to shop for electronics like I'm actively negotiating a hostage crisis where the hostage is my ability to jerk off in my living room without 3 ad agencies knowing about it, and I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.

Amazon no longer allows eBook downloads from their website.

IIRC, when it was launched, with the camera, the Web page had a top image of the product sitting on a bedroom night stand, naturally pointed at the owner's bed.

Either the marketing people weren't very aware of privacy (specifically, the chatter around that time, about covering webcams against hackers, and about whether adtech was listening in on device mics), or they have a dark sense of humor.

These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.

I'm technically ignorant on this but would GDPR apply to this type of thing as well?

(I hope so)