Humanizing Assistants a kind of Privacy Invasion?

From a retail perspective, with further expert comment.

Does humanizing virtual assistants undermine consumer privacy?    by Tom Ryan in Retailwire

A university study finds people increasingly attributing lifelike qualities to virtual assistants and warns this may cause them to reveal more personal information to the companies that use them than they otherwise would.

“These agents are data gathering tools that companies are using to sell us stuff,” said Edward Lank, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, in a statement. “People need to reflect a little to see if they are formulating impressions of these agents rather than seeing them as just a piece of technology and trusting them in ways based on these impressions.”

Researchers had 20 subjects interact with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri and then asked them about the personalities of the virtual agents and to create an avatar for each. Alexa’s sentiment was seen as genuine and caring, while Siri’s was viewed as disingenuous and cunning. Alexa’s individuality was commonly described as neutral and ordinary, while participants considered the individuality of Google — and Siri, especially — more defined and pronounced.   .... " 

Computers Too Human

Saw some of this in our own chatbot testing.     Also famously mentioned in studies of how people react to obviously non-human images in chat interactions, like in the Media Equation.   Is the testing of this idea reasonably designed here?

Sometimes, Computer Programs Seem Too Human for Their Own Good
In The Economist

Researchers at Chungbuk National University in South Korea say they have demonstrated that increasingly human-like machines can invoke feelings of embarrassment in people, making some users hesitant to use assistive artificial intelligence. One experiment involved almost 200 volunteers who initially believed intelligence to be unchangeable, but who felt more embarrassed and incompetent after tests in which they were presented with 16 sets of three words and attempted to think of a fourth word that linked them, with half of the cohort given hints accompanied by an anthropomorphic computer-shaped icon. A second experiment permitted a different set of participants to ask for help rather than having it forced on them at random, which led to similar results. The researchers concluded some people appear to want to avoid losing face by seeking help from an anthropomorphic icon, suggesting there are situations in which the aggressive pseudo-humanization of machine-human interactions could usefully be reduced. .... "