Well, it is Prime Day and as usual, there are some deeply discounted items available on Amazon. My family usually looks but doesn’t buy on Prime Day, hoping to be able to predict the discounts we may see on Cyber Monday or Black Friday in a few weeks. We especially avoid any smart speaker or digital assistant hardware since we have always had (well informed) privacy issues and concerns. This year it has been different. We caved and bought Amazon Echo Dots for the whole family. Here’s why.

Our forever family home is being built and we are planning a move-in just a few months from now. We are going to have more space for the six of us than we have ever had, especially in the kids’ rooms, the master suite, and the kitchen/dining great room. We’ll be a bit more spread out than we’ve ever been and the Echo has some great options for communicating throughout your home without having to scream up the stairs or down the hallway. The intercom feature was a deal sealer for both my wife and myself. The kids are pretty excited too.

More of us are homeschooling than ever now and with four kids, all doing school work nearly every day, we need help sometimes. YouTube can be great to present some complicated concepts in helpful ways (7th-grade math, anyone) but my kids looking at screens and using a Google Search for spelling or calculator solutions isn’t the safest proposition. Alexa (the Virtual Assistant on Amazon Echo) will answer your spelling, language arts, science, and math questions with no risky search results or screen use at all. It is more important for my kids to know how to get information than it is that they know the info when they pass a grade. Alexa and other Virtual Assistants are the new waves of information access and they aren’t going away. They’re only getting smarter and faster.

My kids, like all kids, love to sit around and look at a phone or tablet. We are constantly having to get on to them about their obsessive behavior. We try to set better examples, we don’t always succeed, but giving them alternatives is very helpful. The Echo Dot is a smart speaker without a screen. At night, when the kids want to listen to a podcast or music for bedtime they can ask Alexa to play it for them instead of having their screens in their faces right up to when they fall asleep. Studies have shown this isn’t good for their sleep and can actually very detrimental to their development. With parental controls on the subscription services we use and on Alexa itself, we can ensure that our kids aren’t looking at their screens and are only listening to music and podcasts we’ve approved of.

All of this is great but digital safety and data security are always an issue. Especially with artificial intelligence that is designed to learn about you in order to be more useful to you. There is an obvious trade-off. You’re giving it information in exchange for convenience. I believe most of us consider that an acceptable exchange, considering Alexa and Google Home have been some of the fastest tech product to be integrated into people’s homes. The truth is that we have been making this exchange for a long time without really thinking about it. Every post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, every search on Google, and every purchase or browsing session on Amazon has been used to build a database of advertising information about you. This can be scary to many but in all honesty, that ship has sailed and you raised the sails for it to do so.

When you use these sites, you allow them access to your information. Alexa is no different and my family has considered the risks and decided it’s worth it. First of all, we already get targeted ads because we do so much of our shopping on Amazon and searching on Google. Secondly, the latest models of Amazon Echo Dot have added features like a hardware button to turn off the microphone that makes us feel like we can avoid being listened to when we don’t want to be listened to.

When you narrow it down it is a consideration of opportunity cost. You have an opportunity for convenience but it will cost some of your info. At a $19.99 price point, the Echo Dot is a great deal right now on Prime Day so we bought four of them. They’ll be here in a couple of days and I’ll set one up and let you know how it all goes. Stay tuned for my (late but in-depth) review of the Amazon Echo Dot as a tool for controlling kids’ screen time.

If you shop the Amazon Prime Day today, consider using http://smile.amazon.com and signing up to support our non-profit, Four Point Families. You’ll have to search for Four Point Families and select it as the organization you’d like to partner with. Then Amazon will send .5% of your purchase our way to help us continue to protect families. Thanks.