Drop-In is a strange and mostly ill-advised feature. It’s a way of offering instant communication between Echo devices — essentially a phone call that doesn’t require the receiver to pick up in order to initiate. Hence, “dropping in.”
Amazon introduced it with the new Show and is rolling it out to older Echo devices as a way of facilitating the new intercom feature it introduced this week. We raised a few questions when the feature was first announced alongside free Echo calling back in May, but with the Show arriving this week, the some privacy and security concerns are being raised anew.
The feature is a bit of an odd choice from Amazon, given all of the questions that have been raised around the Echo line’s always-on microphones — though the company did get out in front of things this time around by spelling out the fact that Drop-In is an opt-in feature. Both parties involved have to enable Drop-In in the device’s settings in order to work.
Amazon reiterated that point in a statement provided to TechCrunch, adding, “Customers will know when they are engaged in a Drop-In call as they will first hear a ‘chime,’ and the green light ring on their Echo device will rotate throughout the call. On Echo Show devices, the caller will experience a 10-second ‘frosted glass’ screen when dropping in on an approved contact or room, so the call recipient can decline the Drop In in that timeframe before they are shown on the screen.”
Beyond intercom functionality, the feature is primarily targeted at users looking to check-in on older relatives or who’d like the system double as a baby monitor. The inclusion of visual and audio clues are certainly helpful — so users can’t be entirely stealth. But even with the “frosted glass” that partially obscures the screen for the first 10 seconds, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where the user on the other end is out of the room when a Drop-In is initiated or otherwise doesn’t notice that first chime.
In-home intercom functionality is a useful and much-requested feature for the Echo, but introducing an Echo with a built-in camera was inevitably only going to raise privacy and security concerns around the device. So the optics around launching this feature at the same time were bound to be less than ideal.
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