There aren’t many reasons to be excited about a new smartphone from Amazon

“This is not a consumer hardware company that takes privacy seriously,” says Gamero-Garrido. Since people use smartphones much more than Alexa or Kindle, he says today’s Amazon smartphone “will dramatically increase the amount of potential privacy damage.”

Gamero-Garrido believes Amazon could use Transformer as a data collection tool to learn how people use its devices, build its advertising network, and compete with the likes of Alphabet and Meta, which face regulatory scrutiny in the European Union and California.

One way to do this is through the Fire TV approach. This is Amazon’s streaming TV platform built into a third-party TV (or via a dongle); Even though you may not have purchased a Fire TV from Amazon, the data collected by the operating system is still owned by the company.

“Whether they end up having success with this additional hardware to the phone, or whether they end up using a similar model where they install their operating system on other phones or ‘lite’ phones made by third parties, it has the same effect,” he says. “Ultimately, what Amazon is doing is centralizing all of the network traffic through its own infrastructure so that it can optimize its advertising business.”

If Amazon could detect someone’s illness from their voice, it could recommend a specific cold medication to buy from Amazon Health — that’s an actual patent that Amazon owns. Now if this were running on a device you carry everywhere, it could listen to more of your conversations and serve you better ads, Gamero-Garrido says.

Even with its previous declines, customers have shown general acceptance of Amazon’s devices, says Qasim Fawaz, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who researches security and privacy in consumer devices.

“I believe that when it comes to products, unfortunately, consumers value utility and price over privacy,” Fawaz wrote in an email to WIRED.

The accelerator here could be Panos Panai, Amazon’s head of devices and services, who joined the company in 2023. Panai is best known for helping turn Microsoft’s Surface computer line into an aspirational hardware brand with his “amplified” and emotionally charged keywords.

Panay has already brought that kind of energy to a few Amazon hardware ads, like the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, though he’s never matched the success of the Surface. If Amazon really makes a smartphone, it will need to generate a lot of passion to attract customers.

“If there’s anyone who can do it, it’s Panos,” Geronimo says. “For this reason, I have complete confidence. He is the right person for this kind of initiative.”