At Wednesday’s hardware event, Amazon wanted to make sure you knew it valued your privacy. “We’re investing in privacy across the board,” hardware and services chief Dave Limp told the crowd. “Privacy cannot be an afterthought when it comes to the devices and services we offer our customers. It has to be foundational and built in from the beginning for every piece of hardware, software, and service that we create.”

To prove the point, the company rolled out a new set of privacy features, each one giving users slightly more control. A new camera shutter will electronically disconnect the camera on the Echo Show 5. A separate feature lets you set “privacy zones,” in which a particular part of the camera’s view will be impossible to record or view live. Another setting, due in November, stops the Ring camera from recording while you’re at home. A host of new Alexa skills will let you monitor recordings directly, and even set rolling deletion. It’s a serious run of features, meant to convince you that Amazon is thinking hard about the privacy implications of its smart speakers and cameras.

“Privacy cannot be an afterthought”

But not everyone was convinced. At the same event, Amazon also gave us a flood of new ways to install networked microphones in nearly everything we own: our glasses, our alarm clocks, even our jewelry. It was an all-out push for more Alexa in more places — a troubling thought, if you’re concerned about the invasive nature of always-on microphones.

After months of mounting concerns over police partnerships with Amazon’s Ring subsidiary, privacy advocates weren’t shy about pointing out the contradiction. “This is what Amazon does,” said Evan Greer, a deputy director at Fight for the Future. “They make empty statements to sell their products and then continue to build a for-profit, surveillance dragnet without oversight and accountability.”

On the surface, it might just seem like bad timing. Amazon has been working on these products for a long time — and as it happens, the launch comes after months of escalating privacy scandals around the very idea of a voice-based personal assistant. Every single major provider has been forced to reckon with its use of contractors — actual human beings who listen to your voice assistant messages for verification purposes — and none have had good answers to the privacy concerns.

Apple has even been forced to change its entire data retention model, shifting to a default opt-out for Siri recordings — something Amazon chooses not to offer. Clearly, this was not the best time to launch a massive expansion of your voice assistant program.

The underlying transaction is the same as a Facebook login: data for convenience

But the problem goes much deeper than bad timing. Voice assistants (particularly hardware-agnostic ones like Alexa) offer customers a basic deal: accept the privacy cost of putting a microphone in your home, and you can have this array of voice-activated skills, all powered by a near-invisible network of cloud servers. This deal is familiar to anyone who’s spent any time with Facebook or Google products. Alexa isn’t something you buy with money. It’s almost always bundled, for free, with products that have other more benign purposes, like speakers and screens. That may make the trade-offs more subtle than with a Facebook login or Gmail account, but the underlying transaction is the same: data for convenience.

Like any good salesperson, Amazon has focused more on the benefits than the cost, which means the recent revelations have come as a surprise. On a technical level, it’s not surprising that a voice assistant could not be fully automated, and that human beings might need to listen in to improve the system. But Amazon and other companies were never clear about that part of the bargain, so customers simply didn’t know.

Much of yesterday’s privacy push seems to be about convincing users Amazon is aware of these new concerns, and is responding to them. If you’re freaked out by the idea that Alexa might mishear a wake word and start recording, they’ll give you a command that lets you check for that. If you’re worried about a growing catalog of voice recordings sitting on an Amazon server somewhere, they’ll give you a way to delete them. In the move-fast-and-break-things school of tech ethics, this is how progress happens. You release a product, objections arise, and you fix the objections. It’s a little messy, but as long as you address customer concerns, you should end in a good place — or so the thinking goes.

But privacy is more than just a set of features. Accepting Alexa into your home (or into your glasses) means believing that Amazon isn’t somehow taking advantage of the data you’re giving it. In short, you have to trust them. Every time Alexa expands into some new domain, more trust is required — and every time the service screws up, that trust gets harder to maintain. Seen from that perspective, the new privacy measures could be too little, too late.