Amazon is helping Britain keep its 'top secret data' safe

The use of artificial intelligence is becoming a part of our lives faster than we think, machines are no longer needed by humans to work and similar machines will come to us in the near future. This is due to the use of smart speakers and artificial intelligence voice support devices. 

Smartphones, smartwatches, laptops, computers, digital televisions, cars equipped with tracking devices and even the modern alarm on your doorstep spy on you, thanks to which the world's governments and intelligence agencies today public access to personal information. Rest assured this leaks a lot more data than your average social media monitoring or instant message tracking app, like a Facebook messenger or Viber spy app.

Carissa Veliz, a professor at Oxford University in the UK, warns that information, privacy, and everyday life through smart devices is now at the mercy of technology companies. Any hacker can access anyone's personal data from a small incident 

The process of storing personal information begins when you fall asleep but only if you are wearing a smartwatch or have a cell phone in your head, says a British professor of ethics of artificial intelligence Data on movements and highly private matters is also collected at night. The state-of-the-art doorbell also automatically collects pictures of visitors. 

Smart TV not only collects data on when and what you watch, but if you have time to read the privacy policy, you know that the TV listens to your conversation, keeps it safe, and reserves the right to resell it. You have accepted the privacy policy without reading it. 

The British professor further wrote that the intelligence agencies can record the movements and conversations of anyone from the closed television of the British MI5 and the CIA of the United States. The same thing applies with e-mails from Amazon's digital assistant Alexa and Google's Nest. 

In an effort to improve the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in espionage, the British spy agencies signed a deal with Amazon and contracted AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, to host classified material in a deal aimed at boosting the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage. 

The purchase of the high-security cloud system has been championed by the UK's signals intelligence body GCHQ, and will be used during joint operations by sister services MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defense. 

The contract, which is expected to be worth £500 million to £1 billion over the next 10 years, would increase the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence by the UK's intelligence services. Through this deal the cloud system will be utilised by sister services MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence, during joint operations.

This British spy agencies have been using basic AI, such as translation technology, for years, but it is now scaling up its usage, partly in reaction to hostile governments' use of AI and partly owing to the data boom that makes it beneficial. This scaling up means that you no longer need a human to spy WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds, or data from Viber spy software — it is all being done through tech driven resources.

The deal is a first for the UK, since the UK's security apparatus lags behind its American counterparts in the usage of commercial cloud services. In 2013, the CIA negotiated a $600 million cloud deal with AWS on behalf of all US intelligence organisations. This cloud service was improved last year as part of a new agreement with AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM. 

The new cloud service, which is designed to securely host top-secret information, will make it easier for spies to share data from field locations around the world and power advanced applications like speech recognition, which can "spot" and translate specific voices from hours of intercept recordings. It will also allow GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 to search each other's databases more quickly.