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I'm not certain there exists nothing to reveal. Is there a technical limitation of the system that prevents or avoids recording of "non-'Alexa'" audio? Or do I

I'm not certain there exists nothing to reveal. Is there a technical limitation of the system that prevents or avoids recording of "non-'Alexa'" audio? Or do I just trust Amazon when they say their alway-on device only records when triggered with the magic word? As I think about it, I'd ask the same regarding the voice-controllable phone in my pocket. FWIW, I don't trust the devices, because their operations are out of any consumer's ability to control them, but maybe I'm missing something about their technical limitations that would work in my favor.

joezydeco 10y ago
From looking at the internals, there's technically nothing that prevents uploading all audio constantly to AWS. Practically, it would be unwieldy to have 10,000,000 devices sending audio to 10,000,000 audio decoding and processes 24 hours a day nonstop. You'd also see a huge bandwidth hit at your ISP, which would certainly kill future adoptions if the word got out.
- austenallred 10y ago
  So record the audio 24/7 and compress and send once an hour? Once a day? Or eliminate empty space first. The files wouldn't be that big
  - dpark 10y ago
    Compression over an hour or a day won't do anything meaningful vs compression over, say, a minute. There's just not that much additional redundancy to eliminate. Uploading in a big burst doesn't save on overall bandwidth, either.
  - squarefoot 10y ago
    Totally possible. As an example, Codec2 used in ham-radio applications can send pretty decent voice audio at a few kilobit/s or less, and it keeps sounding perfectly understandable even at 1.2 kbit/s like this short sample: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav More information here: http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452 http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
    - kbenson 10y ago
      To spell it out, that's < 12.7 megabytes every 24 hours. If there are 10 million Echo devices, that's 127 million megabytes a day, or 127 terabytes a day. That's actually not that hard to handle for the company that runs AWS, so while extremely unlikely, it's not impossible. Just very, very costly.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - squarefoot 10y ago
        You don't need to record 24/7. A well planned spying operation would involve multiple devices and connections, location discovery, proximity with other devices etc. Phones, tablets, Home and laptop PCs, Car PCs, Smart TVs, and pretty much every connected device, can be hijacked into becoming a bug or cooperate with any of them if in proximity. The victim cellphone could establish a secure connection via WiFi or Bluetooth with the Echo o any similar assistant, grab the audio data to transmit, alert the user some important upgrade is needed on the phone then start transmitting the data and fake some random download just to make the downlink act as it's receiving something. That way those 12 megabytes of data would remain totally unnoticed. This is of course the product of tinfoilhattery at its finest level, until someone does it for real.
        kbenson 10y ago
        Sure, I was just providing an upper bound for requirements if they decided to store all audio all the time from every device. Of companies that have the capability to do so under their own resources, Amazon in on the short list. Amazon could possibly pull it off and hide it in the rounding of numbers for their normal business. Companies that interact (peer) with them would likely see something though, but possibly not as easily as it seems. The average home internet connection probably downloads far more than 12.6 MB of content from AWS hosted services every day. The only question is whether the upload amount would trigger any alarms. I think in most cases not, as it would probably just go a very small amount towards evening those peering connections out, which are likely very heavy in the other direction.
  - dheera 10y ago
    Not to mention that people aren't actually speaking 24/7. In any given space there are probably people talking for less than 10% of the day.
- michaelt 10y ago
  Doesn't seem any more unwieldy than Skype or Spotify?
- njharman 10y ago
  You do realize this is same company running AWS. One of if not the largest network of cloud services. They can probably do that with idle capacity of one region.
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  I see a lot of people in this thread saying that's not possible, so here's the math: As given by squarefoot, you can record human voice at 1200 bit/sec = 150 bytes/sec. A day is 86400 seconds, assume people are talking (generously) 10% of the day, so 8640 seconds * 150 bytes = 1.3 megabytes per day uploaded to Amazon. Does anyone doubt that _the company that runs AWS_ is incapable of dealing with barely a megabyte per device per day?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ynniv 10y ago
I don't have a link, but the echo doesn't transmit network data until the watchword is detected. It probably has a small local buffer, but not large enough to be useful here. So I expect that an unmodified echo would not provide historical evidence, but there's probably a way for one to be configured to stream audio continuously.
- squarefoot 10y ago
  Unfortunately the only way to check if the above is true would be by examining the device firmware. Also, the definition of "unmodified" and "configured" is very broad in this context. There's no need for a screwdriver or messing with a JTAG port when a well hidden magic packet coming from the Internet can trigger a watchword=off function.
  - ynniv 10y ago
    Right, but this is a targeted action that can only be applied to a limited number of people without causing problems for Amazon. It's not useful when something unexpected happened and there was an echo present.
ahallock 10y ago
If it's true that all audio is being sent to Amazon, I will throw my Echo out today. That's a serious invasion of privacy and breach of trust.
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  The entire point of the Echo and similar devices is that it's always listening.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    The device is always listening (unless you mute the mic), but that doesn't mean it's always sending a stream to Amazon. The device has to continuously process audio to listen for the wake word (upon which it does start sending everything to amazon) and a few seconds of the buffer before that so you can just bark out commands rather than waiting for it to acknowledge you.
  - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
    Listening locally for a trigger word != listening, recording and transmitting. The point of the echo is to have an on-demand voice channel to an artificially intelligent assistant.
deleted 10y ago
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fossuser 10y ago
The device does claim to only send voice recordings to Amazon during a query (when you say the wake word). You can ask Alexa, "Are you always listening?" to get details about it. It's possible that the device doesn't have anything interesting anyway and they were just resisting the disclosure for PR reasons.
- npongratz 10y ago
  > You can ask Alexa, "Are you always listening?" to get details about it. True, I can ask, but I don't know if I'd always believe the answer.

joezydeco 10y ago

From looking at the internals, there's technically nothing that prevents uploading all audio constantly to AWS. Practically, it would be unwieldy to have 10,000,000 devices sending audio to 10,000,000 audio decoding and processes 24 hours a day nonstop. You'd also see a huge bandwidth hit at your ISP, which would certainly kill future adoptions if the word got out.

austenallred 10y ago
So record the audio 24/7 and compress and send once an hour? Once a day? Or eliminate empty space first. The files wouldn't be that big
- dpark 10y ago
  Compression over an hour or a day won't do anything meaningful vs compression over, say, a minute. There's just not that much additional redundancy to eliminate. Uploading in a big burst doesn't save on overall bandwidth, either.
- squarefoot 10y ago
  Totally possible. As an example, Codec2 used in ham-radio applications can send pretty decent voice audio at a few kilobit/s or less, and it keeps sounding perfectly understandable even at 1.2 kbit/s like this short sample: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav More information here: http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452 http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
  - kbenson 10y ago
    To spell it out, that's < 12.7 megabytes every 24 hours. If there are 10 million Echo devices, that's 127 million megabytes a day, or 127 terabytes a day. That's actually not that hard to handle for the company that runs AWS, so while extremely unlikely, it's not impossible. Just very, very costly.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - squarefoot 10y ago
      You don't need to record 24/7. A well planned spying operation would involve multiple devices and connections, location discovery, proximity with other devices etc. Phones, tablets, Home and laptop PCs, Car PCs, Smart TVs, and pretty much every connected device, can be hijacked into becoming a bug or cooperate with any of them if in proximity. The victim cellphone could establish a secure connection via WiFi or Bluetooth with the Echo o any similar assistant, grab the audio data to transmit, alert the user some important upgrade is needed on the phone then start transmitting the data and fake some random download just to make the downlink act as it's receiving something. That way those 12 megabytes of data would remain totally unnoticed. This is of course the product of tinfoilhattery at its finest level, until someone does it for real.
      - kbenson 10y ago
        Sure, I was just providing an upper bound for requirements if they decided to store all audio all the time from every device. Of companies that have the capability to do so under their own resources, Amazon in on the short list. Amazon could possibly pull it off and hide it in the rounding of numbers for their normal business. Companies that interact (peer) with them would likely see something though, but possibly not as easily as it seems. The average home internet connection probably downloads far more than 12.6 MB of content from AWS hosted services every day. The only question is whether the upload amount would trigger any alarms. I think in most cases not, as it would probably just go a very small amount towards evening those peering connections out, which are likely very heavy in the other direction.
- dheera 10y ago
  Not to mention that people aren't actually speaking 24/7. In any given space there are probably people talking for less than 10% of the day.
michaelt 10y ago
Doesn't seem any more unwieldy than Skype or Spotify?
njharman 10y ago
You do realize this is same company running AWS. One of if not the largest network of cloud services. They can probably do that with idle capacity of one region.
owenversteeg 10y ago
I see a lot of people in this thread saying that's not possible, so here's the math: As given by squarefoot, you can record human voice at 1200 bit/sec = 150 bytes/sec. A day is 86400 seconds, assume people are talking (generously) 10% of the day, so 8640 seconds * 150 bytes = 1.3 megabytes per day uploaded to Amazon. Does anyone doubt that _the company that runs AWS_ is incapable of dealing with barely a megabyte per device per day?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ynniv 10y ago

I don't have a link, but the echo doesn't transmit network data until the watchword is detected. It probably has a small local buffer, but not large enough to be useful here. So I expect that an unmodified echo would not provide historical evidence, but there's probably a way for one to be configured to stream audio continuously.

squarefoot 10y ago
Unfortunately the only way to check if the above is true would be by examining the device firmware. Also, the definition of "unmodified" and "configured" is very broad in this context. There's no need for a screwdriver or messing with a JTAG port when a well hidden magic packet coming from the Internet can trigger a watchword=off function.
- ynniv 10y ago
  Right, but this is a targeted action that can only be applied to a limited number of people without causing problems for Amazon. It's not useful when something unexpected happened and there was an echo present.

ahallock 10y ago

If it's true that all audio is being sent to Amazon, I will throw my Echo out today. That's a serious invasion of privacy and breach of trust.

JetSpiegel 10y ago
The entire point of the Echo and similar devices is that it's always listening.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  The device is always listening (unless you mute the mic), but that doesn't mean it's always sending a stream to Amazon. The device has to continuously process audio to listen for the wake word (upon which it does start sending everything to amazon) and a few seconds of the buffer before that so you can just bark out commands rather than waiting for it to acknowledge you.
- FungalRaincloud 10y ago
  Listening locally for a trigger word != listening, recording and transmitting. The point of the echo is to have an on-demand voice channel to an artificially intelligent assistant.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

fossuser 10y ago

The device does claim to only send voice recordings to Amazon during a query (when you say the wake word). You can ask Alexa, "Are you always listening?" to get details about it. It's possible that the device doesn't have anything interesting anyway and they were just resisting the disclosure for PR reasons.

npongratz 10y ago
> You can ask Alexa, "Are you always listening?" to get details about it. True, I can ask, but I don't know if I'd always believe the answer.