Making impulse purchases more likely = good.
Making chargebacks and lawsuits more likely = less good.
Losing their PCI compliance = much less good.
The complaint here is not that Alexa makes it easy for you to spend money. It is that Alexa makes it easy for someone else to spend your money. That's not actually legal and if it becomes a running joke that Alexa fails in this way then eventually Amazon are going to lose in court. I don't know what the PCI rules are, but I would hope that creating a system where anyone within earshot of Alexa can use your credit card is in breach of those rules and presumably Amazon becomes a lot less profitable if they have to start using PayPal to process payments (because their own system is no longer allowed to operate).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
