The 4-minute video introducing Amazon's Echo seems at first like a parody or a glimpse into some dystopian vision of the near-future.

The premise: A seemingly normal family of three brings what looks like a white noise machine into their homes. Echo is actually a speaker, but it also listens to what you're doing. Not all the time, though. Amazon is quick to point out early on that Alexa — the Siri-like voice recognition device Echo employs — only listens when you use a chosen "wake word."

It's not clear though when it stops listening since it's also "always on" and can listen from across the room. (Amazon reps could not be reached for clarification on that point.)

Further on into the video our family grows increasingly accustomed to and dependent upon Alexa/Echo to fulfill their daily needs. It wakes them up, answers trivia questions, compiles shopping lists, plays music and news on command and even tells jokes.

Though for some this is an appealing vision, my initial response was to ask What fresh hell is this?

I'm not the only one.

Over at Hacker News, a savvy commenter summed it up better than I could: "This 'Internet-of-things' trend coincides unfortunately with the 'dragnet surveillance' trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society."

While the discussion thread inevitably veered off into the NSA and Snowden, there's a commoditization aspect as well. Our homes have always seemed a refuge from the merciless world of commerce. I say "seemed" because it's not actually true. Our homes are filled with stuff we've bought, for instance, and our TVs and Internet-connected devices are constantly hitting us with ads.

Increasingly though, Corporate America is looking to use the Internet of Things as a trojan horse to penetrate our remaining private moments. Amazon's not the only company looking to do this. Microsoft filed a patent in 2012 that would allow its Kinect-enabled motion-sensing devices to "see" how many people are watching at a given time and allow advertisers to tailor ads accordingly.

Google has also told federal regulators that it may at some point serve ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.” That came before Google's $3 billion purchase of Nest and its eponymous thermostat. Google has since "clarified" the language in that filing and disputed reports that ads will eventually come to Nest.

Serving ads is definitely different than the type of spying that Microsoft has in mind, but we seem to be quickly moving toward a world in which almost every action — in public and at home — is viewed as a marketing opportunity.

Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem like consumers have any qualms about this. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $7 trillion market by 2020, according to IDC.

That growth all depends on a certain degree of trust. It remains to be seen whether consumers will trust that Alexa's listening is purely "on chip" or whether some data might be transmitted to the cloud. One thing holding Amazon back is space limitations. Constant, 24/7 listening of that sort would require 20.7 GB of storage per household a month, according to one estimate.

It's also far-fetched to think that ISPs would ignore those kinds of massive uploads. Still, Amazon itself points out that the cloud-based Echo "adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences" the more you use it.

Most likely, Echo isn't the privacy doomsday machine that some fear. Even if it never records a word you say, it's worth stepping back a second to assess the weird social and technological crossroads we're at in late 2014. The fact is, we are increasingly willing to allow for possible surveillance and commoditization of our private moments in the name of convenience.

At this point we've been pretty well trained to not care.