16 ms·

Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

279 points by gscott 10y ago

bkbridge 10y ago
Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
- Flammy 10y ago
  > It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data. We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know. Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.
  - troncheadle 10y ago
    > but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users. Almost definitely yes. I've never known a tech company that truly deletes anything
    - api 10y ago
      "Never really delete" is actually standard advice. There are loads of reasons, mostly non-nefarious, why you may want or need that data. Sometimes deleted stuff is archived offline or in slow warehouse databases that are not live, etc.
  - _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
    Can't vote you up enough.
  - wccrawford 10y ago
    If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.
    - Flammy 10y ago
      I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business. Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same: > Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-parrot-7d392bf32ef2#.xux30jpfe https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...
    - mysterydip 10y ago
      I would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).
- clavalle 10y ago
  Unless the guy said "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" or "Alexa, play 'The Sound of Silence'" just after the time of death, I think you are right. I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.
- praseodym 10y ago
  Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data. [1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
  - amelius 10y ago
    You could even convert it to text before sending.
    - Nadya 10y ago
      Especially since Alexa already converts it to text! It wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility. Would it be possible to test this? Check the battery life of the Dot in a completely silent room vs the battery life of a Dot listening to an audiobook played on repeat. If it is actually listening and transcribing it should have a higher power consumption and thus die faster - right?
    - ethbro 10y ago
      For NLP research, you'd want something that preserved more information than text. Questions for anyone in the field: how much is preserved? Is there a < audio but > text form that allows for iterative testing? Maybe the output of a first-pass pheneme decoder? If so, what kind of space requirements?
  - sdegutis 10y ago
    In fact that's just 40gb per year, which is pretty doable even on a local SD card that Alexa could be fitted with. Or even if it stores one month and deletes the oldest one every day, that's still 3gb. Very doable.
  - agentgt 10y ago
    It is also feasible the device could just wait and transmit only voice like data and drop other sound data... (Even my crummy baby monitor can detect the difference.) Speaking of which I wonder what the net traffic usage of the Echo is?
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Https://ubrp.arizona.edu/study-finds-no-difference-in-the-amount-men-and-women-talk/ Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive. Edited with better source/numbers.
  - 9NRtKyP4 10y ago
    > There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
    - MiddleEndian 10y ago
      Well shit my bad. That was the top result from Google with just those numbers quoted when I searched for average number of words spoken per day. I should've been more thorough. Let me see if I can find better numbers. Edit: Done
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  A year of audio at 32kbps (more than enough for speech) is only 120GB. That's only a couple bucks of month on S3 -- at retail pricing. So it's technically and financially feasible to store everything if Amazon wanted to.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    If it's just spoken voice, the customary value is actually 8kbps, mono.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  It would cost about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m Alexa's are active at any given point in time that works out to 380k PB. Ok, that doesn't work yet. However, if you then layer on a flagging system, where only certain users' full record is stored, or only "suspicious incidents" are stored, and you get this down to only flagging 0.1% of all data, you arrive at 380PB of storage. Amazon Glacier costs about $88.000 a year per PB, but there's a profit margin included in that, so I'll assume it costs Amazon just $75k a year. In conclusion, it would cost Amazon about $28.5m a year to run such a system. That's certainly within the realm of possibility and of what LE/SIGINT clients would pay; I assume the NSA would gladly pay that sum x100 for that capability. Sounds like it'd be booming business for Amazon.
  - dannypgh 10y ago
    I think you're orders of magnitude off in marginal cost estimates for glacier users. Datacenters are being built out for a small number of commercial users (e.g. Amazon's core business) and the size of modern HDDs would lead me to estimate that storage is about free in a modern datacenter, the scarce resource is disk-time for read/write operations. That is, projects like glacier let Amazon sell disk that would have otherwise been stranded. It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      I'm not in the datacenter business, so I've been conservative for lack of experience with storage at PB scale. I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing: 30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions. Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.
- api 10y ago
  How many other words and sounds sound a bit like Alexa?
- tyho 10y ago
  > It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard About $2.55 / year [0][1][2], or, storing in AWS S3 "Infrequent access storage", about $180 after 5 years of recording [3][4]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_Bitrates https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb... [3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2FGB%2FMonth+*+24+Kb%2Fs)*(5+years)%5E2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2F...
- bsharitt 10y ago
  Even if Amazon doesn't store all audio by default now, I would if it could become a thing(if it's not already) for law enforcement to basically get a warrant for Amazon(and Google and everyone else who gets into this space) to store everything and send it to law enforcement for specific individuals.
- sixothree 10y ago
  > It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. Actually it would be less than 60 GB per device per year for 24 hour recording at 15 kilobits per second CBR. This includes all silent hours. My guess would be less than 5 GB per device per year to record all spoken words.
- visarga 10y ago
  > Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".
- hueving 10y ago
  Don't confuse what you are allowed to see in the app with what Alexa captured and sent to Amazon. There is no reason to think they are equivalent.
Flammy 10y ago
I'm curious if the police will push this, as it could reveal how much voice information is actually stored. Amazon has declined to answer how much voice information is stored online[1] and how much if that is tied to your identity. We do know that Alexa stores a list of queries you've spoken, and you can "delete" these records, but it is unknown if this impacts the actual voice data behind them. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201809740 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/11/how-closely-is-amazons-echo-listening/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/11...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- FrancoDiaz 10y ago
  Wait a minute, we'd already know if Alexa was recording everything by the network traffic that obviously has already been sniffed. We can assume that Amazon is storing every "Alex,..." query that you've ever done. So what is there to know?
  - Flammy 10y ago
    We know they are streaming it to do all the NLP in the cloud. This is obvious from the computational costs alone of doing NLP. The important question here is "What happens to the audio data streamed to the cloud, a few seconds AFTER the query has been identified (or not identified) and the results sent back to the Alexa device?" The nieve assumption is "all audio data is deleted after processing". The reality is that data is still valuable to Amazon for a variety of uses such as (1) further training their voice recognition software (2) advertising data mining [how many people are in the room, things they are talking about --- note, Facebook's mobile app infamously does this] If they just store the query text, that is 'best case' from a privacy perspective. If they just store query text and query audio, that is less than ideal, but not too bad. If they store all audio, ever recorded, for an indefinite period of time... that is what this police request could reveal: Audio data stored for a non-keyword-trigger, and for days/weeks after the fact.
CodeWriter23 10y ago
From the privacy perspective, IMO, once you put a device in your home that you know is always listening, and is forwarding an unknown amount of audio from your home to a third party, at that point, you have surrendered your right to privacy. Edit: not just my opinion, it's a matter of law. (thanks @mnm1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
- alexwebb2 10y ago
  No, you haven't, any more than when you buy a cell phone with a camera and microphone built in. People still have rights regardless of the products they buy.
  - tastythrowaway2 10y ago
    People have the rights they have agreed to. What does the EULA state? Privacy policy?
    - Flammy 10y ago
      It doesn't say anything, basically. I checked. Alexa Terms of Use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201809740 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Only Alexa privacy policy I can find links to generic Amazon privacy policy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468496 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
    - literallycancer 10y ago
      When will people finally understand that laws are above EULAs or ToS and other toilet paper?
      - coding123 10y ago
        I don't believe they are saying a EULA or ToS is "above the law" they're saying that there is a reasonable argument to say that the expectation of privacy was waived by the guilty party owning an Amazon Echo. If the ToS states these facts more clearly, then that argument would either have more or less weight. Without anything being said in the ToS or EULA, the argument could really go either way, depending on many things, like the judge's mood or interpretation.
guscost 10y ago
This brings up an interesting question. If I say "Alexa, call the police!" or "Alexa, I need an ambulance!" will anything happen? It doesn't officially say it can be used to request emergency response and I'm scared to try it. I wonder if they've received a lot of these requests and/or if they have an emergency team on standby.
- netsharc 10y ago
  I don't think anything will happen, although people can write their own "plugins". It's already a speaker/microphone, why not make it a speakerphone; if you slipped and broke something and can't even crawl to the phone, saying "Alexa, call an ambulance!" and being able to communicate with the rescuers would be helpful. Sadly it's not in their spec to be used as that, yay for closed hardware! Alternatively, Amazon should have a log of music you asked it to play. The suspect is named Bates. If you were being chased by him, could you yell "Alexa, play music by The Police!" followed with "Alexa, play the soundtrack of Bates Motel!"? You'd be dead but at least there'll be a hint for the police somewhere in the cloud. "Alexa, play James Blunt!" "Alexa, play Bates Motel!" "Alexa, play The Killing Hand by Dream Theater!"
- smileysteve 10y ago
  This would be of interest for the elderly, "help, I can't get up" with an omnidirectional microphone instead of a fragile, not waterproof, awkward beeper that you carry everywhere
  - JamieF1 10y ago
    I'm going to look in to this and develop a skill that allows someone to ask for help. Unless it has already been done,will check it out.
    - guscost 10y ago
      Awesome idea. Even if it is just "text my emergency contact" that could be really helpful in a pinch.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
d136o 10y ago
We were playing with one this xmas and of course someone shouted "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" Its answer was to call the police. We all laughed but it made a few of us nervous. Brave new world we live in!
- mcbits 10y ago
  The answer was "call the police," or it actually called the police as an answer? I assume you meant the first, but I'm not quite 100% on that.
  - evan_ 10y ago
    The former.
  - d136o 10y ago
    It just said to call the police, but given it can also turn the tree lights on and off it's not far fetched to imagine law enforcement being looped in via some nutty integration.
notlisted 10y ago
Alexa listens only to the words after the wake word. What's more it doesn't capture more than 10-12s past the wake word. If you have a device you can check this yourself (Alexa, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…). It's actually hard to get it to capture this much. Take a breath or pause to long and capture stops sooner. The request of the police is nutty and indicative of not understanding the technology. Unless the murdered woman yelled out "Alexa {pause a little bit for wakeword recognition} Heeelp, my husband is killing me, call the police" or the husband asked "Alexa, how do I clean a bloody hottub", nothing material will be discovered. I have 4 of them. After the first one I checked what was captured, what was stored, what was streamed. Nothing that mattered.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Checking this by saying "Alexa, <long string of words>" and seeing at what point it starts doing something does not prove that it's not listening all the time, doesn't prove that it doesn't keep recording, and in general only tells you about Alexa's UX, not the underlying technology.
  - notlisted 10y ago
    It stops listening. No action required. You can check in the Alexa app what is recorded (I just did). You can also check what is sent out to Amazon (which is what I did when I got the first one, using wireshark). The hardware is listening all the time, for the wake word. Nothing is sent until a wakeword is received.
    - wtetzner 10y ago
      But you don't know what audio data the local device itself is storing as an implementation detail.
      - notlisted 10y ago
        True, it does have an 8GB flash drive, according to iFixit (4GB in the Echo Dot). For now, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. My cell phone is a much more useful target for the government (location, video/audio, browser history).
politician 10y ago
The device doesn't start listening when you say the wake word, the device is always listening. It's only the UX that responds when the presence of the wake word is detected. This means that the device is continuously monitoring the environment for the presence of the wake word we know about ("Alexa"). Can the device monitor for other words that trigger other UX sequences? Of course it can! Can Amazon deliver an OTA update to this network connected device to change behavior after it leaves the factory? There is no reason to believe that they cannot. So, no, I don't believe the police are wrong here. In fact, I would be in favor of law enforcement having the ability to "tap" these network-attached microphone appliances with a warrant. Then, perhaps, people will begin to understand what they've really bought. EDIT: Passive monitoring ("listening") is not the same thing as storage ("recording"). In some cases below, these are being conflated.
- supergeek133 10y ago
  You're making quite a few assumptions. 1) The device is storing any amount of locally recorded audio. So far evidence says no. 2) Amazon would OTA all echos to upload everything it hears. So far evidence says this hasn't happened. It also likely won't because IMO security people monitor these devices more than anything else on the planet. Some I believe for good reasons, the others just want to play gotcha. 3) If 1 and 2 are true, Amazon keeps the data for an extended period of time. Can we please not tinfoil hat the hell out of these devices like we do the rest of IoT sometimes?
  - politician 10y ago
    I've responded to your position elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264644
  - jdiez17 10y ago
    (I think) the argument your parent is making is that Amazon could easily send a software update to a specific Echo to make it record everything it hears.
    - 10y ago
roflchoppa 10y ago
Interesting that the police is going after this electronic speech data, reminds me of the instance where a parrot witnessed a murder that was posted on this site couple of months ago, in that case the parrot was not able to testify... Also interesting that the lawyer is going for the reasonable expectation of privacy regarding that data, if that holds, then it could allow them to argue due protections from the 4th amendment. But let's ask the question here; is data regarding usage of utilities private? It seems that something that you installed for water usage, should be. Could this data not have been acquired from the water department?
lstroud 10y ago
Probably wouldn't be a horrible thing to be able to add to your will instructions to release data if possible.
alistproducer2 10y ago
I would never put a closed source hot mic in my house. You can trust big brother all you want, but I'm going to stay clear.
- zanny 10y ago
  Every smart phone ever can do this. You have no way to verify the mic isn't in use, you have no way to verify cellular data transmission is not taking place, and you have no way to know the modem is not doing a remote execution injection to change whatever aftermarket free software OS you have running on the device is doing.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    Or if the cell phone provider is telling your baseband to execute some random code, or modifying the baseband itself!
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    So just because my phone is potentially not secure means I should just open up my home to all other sorts of intrusion/attacks? Yes, phones generally can do that, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about what the Echo is doing.
    - illumin8 10y ago
      No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. You're seriously willing to carry smartphones, which have both microphones and cameras, and give no indication visible or otherwise, of when they are listening or recording or sending data, and run whatever dodgy code some asian device manufacturer wanted it to run, but you won't trust a device made by Amazon that people have run wireshark captures against and lights up with big blue LEDs whenever it is listening. Reality called - it wants the tinfoil hat back.
      - 10y ago
andrewclunn 10y ago
"Alexa, who is the murderer?" "I'm sorry, I can't find the answer to the question you asked."
focusgroup0 10y ago
>Police say Bates had several other smart home devices, including a water meter. That piece of tech shows that 140 gallons of water were used between 1AM and 3AM the night Collins was found dead in Bates' hot tub. Investigators allege the water was used to wash away evidence of what happened off of the patio. When every house is IoT connected, we will be very close to a 'post-crime' world.
- scottmf 10y ago
  Or a world where hackers frame innocent people for murder by modifying their water usage stats.
damieng 10y ago
Surprised so much confusion around this. You log into http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards and you see all sorts of queries Alexa/Echo heard from you but didn't understand complete with the audio snippet. If Amazon gave them the account details they just need to log-in to hear them.
funkyy 10y ago
I see that a lot of people say that police did that because it is incompetent. But what if this is actually a way for police and other low tier agencies to check how much Amazon collects? I bet NSA would never work with police and most likely not much with FBI etc. So this might be just a check? This is just a speculation, but we should not assume stupidity of some of the agencies just because its an easy answer.
hbt 10y ago
The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. Crack open the device, test the analog component and confirm the signal only fires when you speak alexa and nothing else. Having said all that, I wouldn't buy it. NSA is known to temper with devices behind the back of companies (no matter how trustworthy you think Amazon/Google/Apple are). Check what they did with Cisco equipment sold to foreigners. They intercepted the shipment, tempered with the device and no one was any wiser until the Snowden leaks. Cisco now ships via proxy to guarantee no tempering. American businesses shouldn't fear globalization or chinese disregard for intellectual property; their own government is fucking them.
- visarga 10y ago
  Have you tried the "infidel" keyword?
- jonnytran 10y ago
  > The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. > It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. I used to think that about my phone, that it was hard-wired to "OK, Google". I had a Moto X (first generation), which is one of the first phones to have this always-listening feature. They claimed that it had special hardware that allowed it to work using very little power. But after a software update, they added a feature that allowed me to retrain the activation phrase to whatever I wanted. They recommend using something with 5 syllables or more. It works. I haven't addressed my phone with "OK, Google" for years. If Motorola (owned by Google at the time) can do it with Moto X, I'm sure Amazon could do it with Alexa too.
rpd9803 10y ago
Alexa, how do you hide a dead body?
- rhizome 10y ago
  Alexa would be an expensive proxy for http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-would-you-dispose-of-the-body-without-getting-caught#155715 http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-wo...
drumttocs8 10y ago
Well, that didn't take long.
bogomipz 10y ago
The article states: >"A ring on the top of the device turns blue to give a visual indication that audio is being recorded. Those clips, or "utterances" as the company calls them, are stored in the cloud until a customer deletes them either individually or all at once." Is there a technical reason for storing this after NLP processing has been completed on the "utterance."? Wouldn't an ephemeral cache be sufficient?
sirtastic 10y ago
Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio profile is then matched to words which are then used for marketing. I wouldn't be surprised if Echo, Google Home, etc do something similar since sending the full audio recordings would be both bandwidth and storage heavy.
- kobeya 10y ago
  "Audio profile" meaning MFCC coefficients? That's still enough to fully reconstruct a meaningful audio stream. Obviously, since it's enough to do speech recognition.
- fucking_tragedy 10y ago
  What difference does it matter if you can still construct words and thus the content of your speech?
savad 10y ago
We can play every Alex query that is recorded using the app

279 points by gscott 10y ago

Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?

Flammy 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data. We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know. Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.
- troncheadle 10y ago
  > but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users. Almost definitely yes. I've never known a tech company that truly deletes anything
  - api 10y ago
    "Never really delete" is actually standard advice. There are loads of reasons, mostly non-nefarious, why you may want or need that data. Sometimes deleted stuff is archived offline or in slow warehouse databases that are not live, etc.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Can't vote you up enough.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.
  - Flammy 10y ago
    I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business. Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same: > Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-parrot-7d392bf32ef2#.xux30jpfe https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...
  - mysterydip 10y ago
    I would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).
clavalle 10y ago
Unless the guy said "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" or "Alexa, play 'The Sound of Silence'" just after the time of death, I think you are right. I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.
praseodym 10y ago
Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data. [1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
- amelius 10y ago
  You could even convert it to text before sending.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Especially since Alexa already converts it to text! It wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility. Would it be possible to test this? Check the battery life of the Dot in a completely silent room vs the battery life of a Dot listening to an audiobook played on repeat. If it is actually listening and transcribing it should have a higher power consumption and thus die faster - right?
  - ethbro 10y ago
    For NLP research, you'd want something that preserved more information than text. Questions for anyone in the field: how much is preserved? Is there a < audio but > text form that allows for iterative testing? Maybe the output of a first-pass pheneme decoder? If so, what kind of space requirements?
- sdegutis 10y ago
  In fact that's just 40gb per year, which is pretty doable even on a local SD card that Alexa could be fitted with. Or even if it stores one month and deletes the oldest one every day, that's still 3gb. Very doable.
- agentgt 10y ago
  It is also feasible the device could just wait and transmit only voice like data and drop other sound data... (Even my crummy baby monitor can detect the difference.) Speaking of which I wonder what the net traffic usage of the Echo is?
MiddleEndian 10y ago
Https://ubrp.arizona.edu/study-finds-no-difference-in-the-amount-men-and-women-talk/ Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive. Edited with better source/numbers.
- 9NRtKyP4 10y ago
  > There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Well shit my bad. That was the top result from Google with just those numbers quoted when I searched for average number of words spoken per day. I should've been more thorough. Let me see if I can find better numbers. Edit: Done
MichaelGG 10y ago
A year of audio at 32kbps (more than enough for speech) is only 120GB. That's only a couple bucks of month on S3 -- at retail pricing. So it's technically and financially feasible to store everything if Amazon wanted to.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  If it's just spoken voice, the customary value is actually 8kbps, mono.
cryptarch 10y ago
It would cost about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m Alexa's are active at any given point in time that works out to 380k PB. Ok, that doesn't work yet. However, if you then layer on a flagging system, where only certain users' full record is stored, or only "suspicious incidents" are stored, and you get this down to only flagging 0.1% of all data, you arrive at 380PB of storage. Amazon Glacier costs about $88.000 a year per PB, but there's a profit margin included in that, so I'll assume it costs Amazon just $75k a year. In conclusion, it would cost Amazon about $28.5m a year to run such a system. That's certainly within the realm of possibility and of what LE/SIGINT clients would pay; I assume the NSA would gladly pay that sum x100 for that capability. Sounds like it'd be booming business for Amazon.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  I think you're orders of magnitude off in marginal cost estimates for glacier users. Datacenters are being built out for a small number of commercial users (e.g. Amazon's core business) and the size of modern HDDs would lead me to estimate that storage is about free in a modern datacenter, the scarce resource is disk-time for read/write operations. That is, projects like glacier let Amazon sell disk that would have otherwise been stranded. It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    I'm not in the datacenter business, so I've been conservative for lack of experience with storage at PB scale. I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing: 30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions. Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.
api 10y ago
How many other words and sounds sound a bit like Alexa?
tyho 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard About $2.55 / year [0][1][2], or, storing in AWS S3 "Infrequent access storage", about $180 after 5 years of recording [3][4]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/ [1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_Bitrates https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb... [3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2FGB%2FMonth+*+24+Kb%2Fs)*(5+years)%5E2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2F...
bsharitt 10y ago
Even if Amazon doesn't store all audio by default now, I would if it could become a thing(if it's not already) for law enforcement to basically get a warrant for Amazon(and Google and everyone else who gets into this space) to store everything and send it to law enforcement for specific individuals.
sixothree 10y ago
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. Actually it would be less than 60 GB per device per year for 24 hour recording at 15 kilobits per second CBR. This includes all silent hours. My guess would be less than 5 GB per device per year to record all spoken words.
visarga 10y ago
> Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".
hueving 10y ago
Don't confuse what you are allowed to see in the app with what Alexa captured and sent to Amazon. There is no reason to think they are equivalent.

Flammy 10y ago

I'm curious if the police will push this, as it could reveal how much voice information is actually stored. Amazon has declined to answer how much voice information is stored online[1] and how much if that is tied to your identity. We do know that Alexa stores a list of queries you've spoken, and you can "delete" these records, but it is unknown if this impacts the actual voice data behind them. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201809740 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/11/how-closely-is-amazons-echo-listening/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/11...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
Wait a minute, we'd already know if Alexa was recording everything by the network traffic that obviously has already been sniffed. We can assume that Amazon is storing every "Alex,..." query that you've ever done. So what is there to know?
- Flammy 10y ago
  We know they are streaming it to do all the NLP in the cloud. This is obvious from the computational costs alone of doing NLP. The important question here is "What happens to the audio data streamed to the cloud, a few seconds AFTER the query has been identified (or not identified) and the results sent back to the Alexa device?" The nieve assumption is "all audio data is deleted after processing". The reality is that data is still valuable to Amazon for a variety of uses such as (1) further training their voice recognition software (2) advertising data mining [how many people are in the room, things they are talking about --- note, Facebook's mobile app infamously does this] If they just store the query text, that is 'best case' from a privacy perspective. If they just store query text and query audio, that is less than ideal, but not too bad. If they store all audio, ever recorded, for an indefinite period of time... that is what this police request could reveal: Audio data stored for a non-keyword-trigger, and for days/weeks after the fact.

CodeWriter23 10y ago

From the privacy perspective, IMO, once you put a device in your home that you know is always listening, and is forwarding an unknown amount of audio from your home to a third party, at that point, you have surrendered your right to privacy. Edit: not just my opinion, it's a matter of law. (thanks @mnm1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

alexwebb2 10y ago
No, you haven't, any more than when you buy a cell phone with a camera and microphone built in. People still have rights regardless of the products they buy.
- tastythrowaway2 10y ago
  People have the rights they have agreed to. What does the EULA state? Privacy policy?
  - Flammy 10y ago
    It doesn't say anything, basically. I checked. Alexa Terms of Use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201809740 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Only Alexa privacy policy I can find links to generic Amazon privacy policy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468496 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    When will people finally understand that laws are above EULAs or ToS and other toilet paper?
    - coding123 10y ago
      I don't believe they are saying a EULA or ToS is "above the law" they're saying that there is a reasonable argument to say that the expectation of privacy was waived by the guilty party owning an Amazon Echo. If the ToS states these facts more clearly, then that argument would either have more or less weight. Without anything being said in the ToS or EULA, the argument could really go either way, depending on many things, like the judge's mood or interpretation.

guscost 10y ago

This brings up an interesting question. If I say "Alexa, call the police!" or "Alexa, I need an ambulance!" will anything happen? It doesn't officially say it can be used to request emergency response and I'm scared to try it. I wonder if they've received a lot of these requests and/or if they have an emergency team on standby.

netsharc 10y ago
I don't think anything will happen, although people can write their own "plugins". It's already a speaker/microphone, why not make it a speakerphone; if you slipped and broke something and can't even crawl to the phone, saying "Alexa, call an ambulance!" and being able to communicate with the rescuers would be helpful. Sadly it's not in their spec to be used as that, yay for closed hardware! Alternatively, Amazon should have a log of music you asked it to play. The suspect is named Bates. If you were being chased by him, could you yell "Alexa, play music by The Police!" followed with "Alexa, play the soundtrack of Bates Motel!"? You'd be dead but at least there'll be a hint for the police somewhere in the cloud. "Alexa, play James Blunt!" "Alexa, play Bates Motel!" "Alexa, play The Killing Hand by Dream Theater!"
smileysteve 10y ago
This would be of interest for the elderly, "help, I can't get up" with an omnidirectional microphone instead of a fragile, not waterproof, awkward beeper that you carry everywhere
- JamieF1 10y ago
  I'm going to look in to this and develop a skill that allows someone to ask for help. Unless it has already been done,will check it out.
  - guscost 10y ago
    Awesome idea. Even if it is just "text my emergency contact" that could be really helpful in a pinch.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

d136o 10y ago

We were playing with one this xmas and of course someone shouted "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" Its answer was to call the police. We all laughed but it made a few of us nervous. Brave new world we live in!

mcbits 10y ago
The answer was "call the police," or it actually called the police as an answer? I assume you meant the first, but I'm not quite 100% on that.
- evan_ 10y ago
  The former.
- d136o 10y ago
  It just said to call the police, but given it can also turn the tree lights on and off it's not far fetched to imagine law enforcement being looped in via some nutty integration.

notlisted 10y ago

Alexa listens only to the words after the wake word. What's more it doesn't capture more than 10-12s past the wake word. If you have a device you can check this yourself (Alexa, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…). It's actually hard to get it to capture this much. Take a breath or pause to long and capture stops sooner. The request of the police is nutty and indicative of not understanding the technology. Unless the murdered woman yelled out "Alexa {pause a little bit for wakeword recognition} Heeelp, my husband is killing me, call the police" or the husband asked "Alexa, how do I clean a bloody hottub", nothing material will be discovered. I have 4 of them. After the first one I checked what was captured, what was stored, what was streamed. Nothing that mattered.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
Checking this by saying "Alexa, <long string of words>" and seeing at what point it starts doing something does not prove that it's not listening all the time, doesn't prove that it doesn't keep recording, and in general only tells you about Alexa's UX, not the underlying technology.
- notlisted 10y ago
  It stops listening. No action required. You can check in the Alexa app what is recorded (I just did). You can also check what is sent out to Amazon (which is what I did when I got the first one, using wireshark). The hardware is listening all the time, for the wake word. Nothing is sent until a wakeword is received.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    But you don't know what audio data the local device itself is storing as an implementation detail.
    - notlisted 10y ago
      True, it does have an 8GB flash drive, according to iFixit (4GB in the Echo Dot). For now, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. My cell phone is a much more useful target for the government (location, video/audio, browser history).

politician 10y ago

The device doesn't start listening when you say the wake word, the device is always listening. It's only the UX that responds when the presence of the wake word is detected. This means that the device is continuously monitoring the environment for the presence of the wake word we know about ("Alexa"). Can the device monitor for other words that trigger other UX sequences? Of course it can! Can Amazon deliver an OTA update to this network connected device to change behavior after it leaves the factory? There is no reason to believe that they cannot. So, no, I don't believe the police are wrong here. In fact, I would be in favor of law enforcement having the ability to "tap" these network-attached microphone appliances with a warrant. Then, perhaps, people will begin to understand what they've really bought. EDIT: Passive monitoring ("listening") is not the same thing as storage ("recording"). In some cases below, these are being conflated.

supergeek133 10y ago
You're making quite a few assumptions. 1) The device is storing any amount of locally recorded audio. So far evidence says no. 2) Amazon would OTA all echos to upload everything it hears. So far evidence says this hasn't happened. It also likely won't because IMO security people monitor these devices more than anything else on the planet. Some I believe for good reasons, the others just want to play gotcha. 3) If 1 and 2 are true, Amazon keeps the data for an extended period of time. Can we please not tinfoil hat the hell out of these devices like we do the rest of IoT sometimes?
- politician 10y ago
  I've responded to your position elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264644
- jdiez17 10y ago
  (I think) the argument your parent is making is that Amazon could easily send a software update to a specific Echo to make it record everything it hears.
  - 10y ago

roflchoppa 10y ago

Interesting that the police is going after this electronic speech data, reminds me of the instance where a parrot witnessed a murder that was posted on this site couple of months ago, in that case the parrot was not able to testify... Also interesting that the lawyer is going for the reasonable expectation of privacy regarding that data, if that holds, then it could allow them to argue due protections from the 4th amendment. But let's ask the question here; is data regarding usage of utilities private? It seems that something that you installed for water usage, should be. Could this data not have been acquired from the water department?

lstroud 10y ago

Probably wouldn't be a horrible thing to be able to add to your will instructions to release data if possible.

alistproducer2 10y ago

I would never put a closed source hot mic in my house. You can trust big brother all you want, but I'm going to stay clear.

zanny 10y ago
Every smart phone ever can do this. You have no way to verify the mic isn't in use, you have no way to verify cellular data transmission is not taking place, and you have no way to know the modem is not doing a remote execution injection to change whatever aftermarket free software OS you have running on the device is doing.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Or if the cell phone provider is telling your baseband to execute some random code, or modifying the baseband itself!
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  So just because my phone is potentially not secure means I should just open up my home to all other sorts of intrusion/attacks? Yes, phones generally can do that, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about what the Echo is doing.
  - illumin8 10y ago
    No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. You're seriously willing to carry smartphones, which have both microphones and cameras, and give no indication visible or otherwise, of when they are listening or recording or sending data, and run whatever dodgy code some asian device manufacturer wanted it to run, but you won't trust a device made by Amazon that people have run wireshark captures against and lights up with big blue LEDs whenever it is listening. Reality called - it wants the tinfoil hat back.
    - 10y ago

andrewclunn 10y ago

"Alexa, who is the murderer?" "I'm sorry, I can't find the answer to the question you asked."

focusgroup0 10y ago

>Police say Bates had several other smart home devices, including a water meter. That piece of tech shows that 140 gallons of water were used between 1AM and 3AM the night Collins was found dead in Bates' hot tub. Investigators allege the water was used to wash away evidence of what happened off of the patio. When every house is IoT connected, we will be very close to a 'post-crime' world.

scottmf 10y ago
Or a world where hackers frame innocent people for murder by modifying their water usage stats.

damieng 10y ago

Surprised so much confusion around this. You log into http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards and you see all sorts of queries Alexa/Echo heard from you but didn't understand complete with the audio snippet. If Amazon gave them the account details they just need to log-in to hear them.

funkyy 10y ago

I see that a lot of people say that police did that because it is incompetent. But what if this is actually a way for police and other low tier agencies to check how much Amazon collects? I bet NSA would never work with police and most likely not much with FBI etc. So this might be just a check? This is just a speculation, but we should not assume stupidity of some of the agencies just because its an easy answer.

hbt 10y ago

The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. Crack open the device, test the analog component and confirm the signal only fires when you speak alexa and nothing else. Having said all that, I wouldn't buy it. NSA is known to temper with devices behind the back of companies (no matter how trustworthy you think Amazon/Google/Apple are). Check what they did with Cisco equipment sold to foreigners. They intercepted the shipment, tempered with the device and no one was any wiser until the Snowden leaks. Cisco now ships via proxy to guarantee no tempering. American businesses shouldn't fear globalization or chinese disregard for intellectual property; their own government is fucking them.

visarga 10y ago
Have you tried the "infidel" keyword?
jonnytran 10y ago
> The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. > It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. I used to think that about my phone, that it was hard-wired to "OK, Google". I had a Moto X (first generation), which is one of the first phones to have this always-listening feature. They claimed that it had special hardware that allowed it to work using very little power. But after a software update, they added a feature that allowed me to retrain the activation phrase to whatever I wanted. They recommend using something with 5 syllables or more. It works. I haven't addressed my phone with "OK, Google" for years. If Motorola (owned by Google at the time) can do it with Moto X, I'm sure Amazon could do it with Alexa too.

rpd9803 10y ago

Alexa, how do you hide a dead body?

rhizome 10y ago
Alexa would be an expensive proxy for http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-would-you-dispose-of-the-body-without-getting-caught#155715 http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-wo...

drumttocs8 10y ago

Well, that didn't take long.

bogomipz 10y ago

The article states: >"A ring on the top of the device turns blue to give a visual indication that audio is being recorded. Those clips, or "utterances" as the company calls them, are stored in the cloud until a customer deletes them either individually or all at once." Is there a technical reason for storing this after NLP processing has been completed on the "utterance."? Wouldn't an ephemeral cache be sufficient?

sirtastic 10y ago

Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio profile is then matched to words which are then used for marketing. I wouldn't be surprised if Echo, Google Home, etc do something similar since sending the full audio recordings would be both bandwidth and storage heavy.

kobeya 10y ago
"Audio profile" meaning MFCC coefficients? That's still enough to fully reconstruct a meaningful audio stream. Obviously, since it's enough to do speech recognition.
fucking_tragedy 10y ago
What difference does it matter if you can still construct words and thus the content of your speech?

savad 10y ago

We can play every Alex query that is recorded using the app