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I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon

by gordyf 10y ago

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

chipperyman573 10y ago
If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon
- ajross 10y ago
  Or if you have a conversation about coffee[1] including the word Alexa[2], but that cannot be parsed or validated as a "query" and produces no response from the device, does that audio get stored somewhere? Could it be captured in transit by other actors? Seems like an important distinction to me. [1] Or, y'know, about some subject more subpoenable or privacy-sensitive. [2] Or, y'know, not including the word Alexa but triggering the on-device recognition anyway. "Alex, uh, here's your payment for murder."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hillz 10y ago
    Sentences after the 'Alexa' key word are still recorded as un-identified questions that you can view in the Alexa app. Source: bought mom one, have used it.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  According to others in the thread (i know nothing of this), it sounds like that is easily verifiable though, and not done. Ie, it sounds like they've monitored the outbound traffic of the device and it only sends Alexa... requests. It's possible that they keep a rolling buffer of all audio in the device though. There could be legitimate reason to hold onto such a window of audio. Would make for an interesting discovery.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?
    - evilduck 10y ago
      I could imagine trying to capture and analyze at least a few words leading up to the trigger word of 'Alexa' to help make it more accurate. Even if the trigger word is Alexa, different languages, dialects, and slang might vary quite a bit. Some significant portion of people might use "Yo, Alexa...", vs "Hey Alexa...", vs. <a second or two pause> "Alexa...". I'm sure someone with a spouse or child named "Alex", "Alexander", "Alexandra" and so on might also trigger it by accident a bunch, e.g. "Alex, uh, who called?". Matching all of those trigger patterns would help filter out false positive matches, or take false negatives and refine them so more people can use the product with their own language style and be less frustrated.
      - krallja 10y ago
        You can also configure the wake word as "Echo" or "Amazon" if Alexa is too ambiguous.
    - avar 10y ago
      "What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, Alexa?"
      - Johnny555 10y ago
        Allowing that sort of sentence construct violates the privacy afforded by starting with the key phrase. If the Echo did allow this, I would not own one since it would send a lot more unintended sentence fragments to Amazon. By saying "Alexa" first, it gives me a chance to hear the wake-up tone before I continue my sentence. So if I'm saying to my friend Alex "Alex uuh, tomorrow we will rob the bank", I have a chance to stop before incriminating myself. But if I say "Tomorrow we'll rob the bank Alex uh... are you in?" and the Echo interprets that as a command, then it's too late, it's already been sent and analyzed.
- gordyf 10y ago
  As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I say will help you.) Sometimes the wake-word detection is mistakenly triggered and some unrelated audio gets streamed to Amazon, but the LEDs will still light up, and at times it'll even reply to a query that was never intended (I've been watching TV when my Echo will hear something and reply that I don't have any timers set, or whatever) but these recordings would still be covered by the link I pasted in the help text above. I think a lot of the HN paranoia about these devices is overblown. All of this functionality is provided by devices that you already own, including hardware wake-word detection on all modern smartphones, which I assume everyone here carries around everywhere and recharges daily without much concern.
  - zeta0134 10y ago
    I think there's a stronger mental disconnect here in a lot of consumers. Detecting the wake word is easy to do locally; doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally. Because the wake word is able to be processed offline, there is no need for the Echo device to record and transmit audio all the time. While the hardware is physically capable of doing this (and therefore, it will never be possible to fully eliminate doubt in the device's security) it would not be in Amazon's or the customer's best interest. Talk about a waste of resources, and a privacy nightmare!
    - eclipxe 10y ago
      Exactly. There is no cost model that accounts for the device constantly streaming realtime audio data to Amazon. Just doesn't make sense.
      - visarga 10y ago
        But it could still record background audio and transmit it later to Amazon, when an Alexa query is triggered. How do we know that it doesn't do that? Has anyone opened up the data stream to check what audio it contains?
jon-wood 10y ago
I think they're talking about the distinction between the actual audio, which can be listened to and deleted from the Alexa app, and the processed data breaking it down into a (potential) query, possibly sitting nowhere but some query logs for underlying services.

by gordyf 10y ago

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

chipperyman573 10y ago

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

ajross 10y ago
Or if you have a conversation about coffee[1] including the word Alexa[2], but that cannot be parsed or validated as a "query" and produces no response from the device, does that audio get stored somewhere? Could it be captured in transit by other actors? Seems like an important distinction to me. [1] Or, y'know, about some subject more subpoenable or privacy-sensitive. [2] Or, y'know, not including the word Alexa but triggering the on-device recognition anyway. "Alex, uh, here's your payment for murder."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hillz 10y ago
  Sentences after the 'Alexa' key word are still recorded as un-identified questions that you can view in the Alexa app. Source: bought mom one, have used it.
notheguyouthink 10y ago
According to others in the thread (i know nothing of this), it sounds like that is easily verifiable though, and not done. Ie, it sounds like they've monitored the outbound traffic of the device and it only sends Alexa... requests. It's possible that they keep a rolling buffer of all audio in the device though. There could be legitimate reason to hold onto such a window of audio. Would make for an interesting discovery.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?
  - evilduck 10y ago
    I could imagine trying to capture and analyze at least a few words leading up to the trigger word of 'Alexa' to help make it more accurate. Even if the trigger word is Alexa, different languages, dialects, and slang might vary quite a bit. Some significant portion of people might use "Yo, Alexa...", vs "Hey Alexa...", vs. <a second or two pause> "Alexa...". I'm sure someone with a spouse or child named "Alex", "Alexander", "Alexandra" and so on might also trigger it by accident a bunch, e.g. "Alex, uh, who called?". Matching all of those trigger patterns would help filter out false positive matches, or take false negatives and refine them so more people can use the product with their own language style and be less frustrated.
    - krallja 10y ago
      You can also configure the wake word as "Echo" or "Amazon" if Alexa is too ambiguous.
  - avar 10y ago
    "What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, Alexa?"
    - Johnny555 10y ago
      Allowing that sort of sentence construct violates the privacy afforded by starting with the key phrase. If the Echo did allow this, I would not own one since it would send a lot more unintended sentence fragments to Amazon. By saying "Alexa" first, it gives me a chance to hear the wake-up tone before I continue my sentence. So if I'm saying to my friend Alex "Alex uuh, tomorrow we will rob the bank", I have a chance to stop before incriminating myself. But if I say "Tomorrow we'll rob the bank Alex uh... are you in?" and the Echo interprets that as a command, then it's too late, it's already been sent and analyzed.
gordyf 10y ago
As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I say will help you.) Sometimes the wake-word detection is mistakenly triggered and some unrelated audio gets streamed to Amazon, but the LEDs will still light up, and at times it'll even reply to a query that was never intended (I've been watching TV when my Echo will hear something and reply that I don't have any timers set, or whatever) but these recordings would still be covered by the link I pasted in the help text above. I think a lot of the HN paranoia about these devices is overblown. All of this functionality is provided by devices that you already own, including hardware wake-word detection on all modern smartphones, which I assume everyone here carries around everywhere and recharges daily without much concern.
- zeta0134 10y ago
  I think there's a stronger mental disconnect here in a lot of consumers. Detecting the wake word is easy to do locally; doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally. Because the wake word is able to be processed offline, there is no need for the Echo device to record and transmit audio all the time. While the hardware is physically capable of doing this (and therefore, it will never be possible to fully eliminate doubt in the device's security) it would not be in Amazon's or the customer's best interest. Talk about a waste of resources, and a privacy nightmare!
  - eclipxe 10y ago
    Exactly. There is no cost model that accounts for the device constantly streaming realtime audio data to Amazon. Just doesn't make sense.
    - visarga 10y ago
      But it could still record background audio and transmit it later to Amazon, when an Alexa query is triggered. How do we know that it doesn't do that? Has anyone opened up the data stream to check what audio it contains?

jon-wood 10y ago

I think they're talking about the distinction between the actual audio, which can be listened to and deleted from the Alexa app, and the processed data breaking it down into a (potential) query, possibly sitting nowhere but some query logs for underlying services.