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Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time

Old_JoeOld_Joe
in Off-Topic
The following rather disquieting commentary is currently running in The Washington Post. Below are lightly edited excerpts from that article.


When Alexa runs your home, Amazon tracks you in more ways than you might want.

Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, “Are you crazy?”

Yet that’s essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it’s hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley’s next frontier.

Aside from muting Echo’s microphone, you cannot stop Amazon from making recordings of your conversations with Alexa. Many smart-speaker owners don’t realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple’s Siri, and until recently Google’s Assistant, by default also keep recordings.

So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

For as much as we fret about snooping apps on our computers and phones, our homes are where the rubber really hits the road for privacy. It’s easy to rationalize away concerns by thinking a single smart speaker or appliance couldn’t know enough to matter. But across the increasingly connected home, there’s a brazen data grab going on, and there are few regulations, watchdogs or common-sense practices to keep it in check.

Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Facebook in our smart homes. Any personal data that’s collected can and will be used against us. An obvious place to begin: Alexa, stop recording us.

Comments

  • TedTed
    @MFO Members: Amazon’s Alexa technology is designed to capture voice data only after a specific voice command, called a wake word, triggers a recording mechanism. Despite some instances where private conversations were accidentally recorded and uploaded to the cloud. There is no evidence to suggest the device records every conversation and sends it the cloud. It does record conversations when it hears the wake word, and in some cases the device has misinterpreted speech when people didn't actually say the wake work.
    Regards,
    Ted
  • Old_JoeOld_Joe
    "technology is designed to"

    If you had spent 40 years working in audio, radio and electronics as I did you would immediately recognize the fatuity of that comment. What is "designed" and what actually happens are frequently completely different situations.
  • Sven
    Can all smartphones also listen in even when recording app is turned off?
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