Amazon Echo Dots are coming to every St. Louis University dorm room

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Alexa, can you wake me up for my 8 a.m. class?

St. Louis University in Missouri is equipping all its dorm rooms — more than 2,300 of them — with Amazon Echo Dots that are customized to SLU-specific questions: sports, concerts, speakers on campus, and other collegiate activities.

This is the first university campus to implement personal smart speakers (other higher education institutions like Arizona State University have put devices in shared student spaces), but this is really part of a greater trend of smart speakers taking over communal areas.

“Every minute we can save our students from having to search for the information they need online is another minute that they can spend focused on what matters most: their education,” David Hakanson, the university’s vice president and chief information officer, said in the announcement earlier this month.

The university conducted a pilot test of the technology last semester in select residence halls, and the results clearly came out positive.

SLU now dedicates an entire webpage called Amazon and Saint Louis University to introduce the program, outfitted with frequently asked questions, a statement on privacy, and a list of SLU-specific questions students can ask the device.

There’s even a promotional video welcoming the devices to campus:

Although the privacy statement (akin and linked to Amazon’s Alexa for Business frequently asked questions page) says questions will not be tracked, audio will not get recorded, and that no personal information is linked to the devices, this still seems like a privacy scandal waiting to happen.

Even if Amazon and SLU both promise to not track attributable or specific student information (both will be collecting broad-sweeping data though), cyber-savvy interlopers — students included — are surely going to try hacking the devices and some data will mostly likely be leaked or collected.

A simple search of “how to hack alexa dot” yields thousands of results, with alarming links to stories like “A Hack can Turn an Amazon Echo into a ‘Wiretap’.”

Cyberthreats already pose a massive threat for universities. New York University, with one of the best cybersecurity programs in the country for example, was targeted by Russian hackers and as of March 2017 had hundreds of open IT risks, many of them categorized as a “high risk.”

Alexa is now just another target.

So while this may increase convenience and quality of life in the immediacy, the long-term effects (casual things like identity theft, privacy breeches, etc.) might need a deeper evaluation.

It is important to note, however, that these concerns are not new or specific to the new SLU partnership with Amazon and is instead a privacy concern for device users worldwide.

“What is most exciting to me is the enhanced connectivity to the campus community these devices will provide,” said Kent Porterfield, SLU’s vice president for student development, in the announcement. “The more connected and engaged students are, the more they learn and benefit from their SLU experience.”

The university, according to the AWS business frequently asked questions page, has the ability to collect information from the SLU-specific questions, which will be interesting to see whether that changes how the university engages with its students.

Who needs new friends when Alexa’s around?