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This is a non-issue. The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. Yes, it's pos

This is a non-issue. The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. Yes, it's possible that the defendants cat meowed right before the murder and it sounded like "Alexa". But it seems incredibly unlikely. Prosecutors are just trying to cover every base but the likelihood that this will yield anything is very low.

vidarh 10y ago
Just a few minutes ago, my Alexa triggered on a phone conversation someone was having across the room. It happens fairly regularly. While I agree it's unlikely to have caught any specific incident, do this often enough and sooner or later something will show up - the recognition is not particularly precise.
andrepd 10y ago
> The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. I wonder, how on earth do you know that, that you are able to dismiss it with such confidence as a non-issue. That's the problem with proprietary systems (proprietary always-on microphones at that). I would be surprised if they weren't actually listening and analysing and storing data from the microphone feed at all times.
- danielvf 10y ago
  You can just watch the network traffic from the device to see when it is streaming audio. Now this obviously doesn't rule out the device saving stuff locally, but plenty of people have verified that it does generally only send lots of data to the server when you have just asked it to wake up.
  - jamornh 10y ago
    Although that does not rule out the possibility that it stores data locally and only transmit the recorded payload (since the time of last transmission) with the next legitimate payload when the wake word is spoken. Not saying that they do though since if they were discovered to be doing that, it's way too damaging for Amazon's reputation for it to be worth going through the trouble.
  - ben174 10y ago
    It is possible it's doing local voice recognition on all audio, and just sending the text in their payloads. If the content is encrypted, there's no way for any network snooping to determine what they're sending.
    - chatmasta 10y ago
      This is software... saying there's "no way" is usually incorrect. For example, you could root the device and disable the encryption. Or, you could perform experiments in a controlled setting where you play a series of identical recordings to Alexa and measure the statistical similarity in the outgoing data for each. The encryption scheme probably provides more entropy than just the audio, so maybe statistical analysis wouldn't help, but it's a start.
- vollmond 10y ago
  FWIW, I've seen a couple threads on Reddit where people did network sniffing -- the echo only had network traffic after the wakeword. So, in a hearsay/amateur manner, it seems to not be doing that. As someone else mentioned, they could of course record constantly, then compress and transmit in batches, and that would probably go unnoticed.
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    > As someone else mentioned, they could of course record constantly, then compress and transmit in batches, and that would probably go unnoticed. Possibly, but it can be fingerprinted by using known audio samples and intentionally producing very large amounts of data. See my other reply.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  I hear this all the time and it boils down to what another poster said. I can monitor all the traffic going through my network. If the device was constantly streaming audio it would be very obvious. To which someone once replied to me: "But what if they aren't sending traffic through your network? What if they are using 4G or something like that?" To which I replied that while I have not personally done it. You could scan using software defined radio to detect that sort of thing. And if it was doing that someone would notice. Plus if you tore down the hardware they would notice the antenna. To which they replied "what it it uses something you can't detect with that?" To which I walked away because I didn't feel like explaining how physics works.
  - idanoeman 10y ago
    How do you know they don't 1. Listen all the time 2. Use a small neural network on the device to detect when a voice is present 3. Collect this data into one zip file, then send the file when the user says "Alexa", or anything remotely close. They could even put a size limit on the data upload to reduce the variance to prevent you from ever testing whether they do this. Or, they could simply transcribe the audio on the device and upload the text. Any audio they are unsure of could be uploaded to the server to be handled by a beefier neural network.
    - andrepd 10y ago
      Yes, exactly this. They could easily just TTS what you are saying, save the text, and send it together with the rest of the info when you say "Alexa". Thus only sending information when you say "Alexa" but managing to upload all your conversations. I would be very surprised if they aren't doing something like this. The power of analysing which products you talk about in your home more often, what kind of stuff you consume, what affairs do you discuss at home, etc, is too good to pass up. And seriously frightening.
      - throwaway2016a 10y ago
        It is very well known that the actually speech processing happens on the cloud. To deploy a whole cloud voice recognition system if you have distributed network with TTS capability on the device would be quite a lot of redundant work to go through. However, with that said, unless they do certificate pinning on their device the answer to that is to MITM the device and snoop on the traffic. If they do certificate pinning the answer is: 1. Pre-record an Alexa commend 2. Play back the recording 3. Wait a minute 4. Replay the command 5. Measure the size of the packets going across the network 6. Wait a week while playing something that sounds like natural conversation - say an audio book 7. Replay the command audio file 8. Measure the amount size of data sent between the end of the second command and the end of the last It should be slightly more than the second command was to account for things like checking for updates. But if it includes the TTS (which is essentially an audio book transcribed at this point) than it would be quite a bit larger even with text compression.
LordKano 10y ago
There are too many checkers players in a chess world. They're attempting to establish the precedent today. Tomorrow(figurative, not literal), when such devices send everything to the cloud to be processed "To reduce false positives", there will be much more data to mine. I won't have one of these devices in my house. I won't have an xbone in my house for the same reason. Today, they're not much of a threat to privacy but long term, the risk is too great for my comfort. They can't be trusted.
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  So you don't have a smartphone?
  - dandelion_lover 10y ago
    Reducing the attack surface is already a good defense, even if you have a smartphone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      I don't know about you, but I have no desire to become a digital pariah and avoid useful technologies just because they may, at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then. I'm a believer in picking my battles, and see no reason whatsoever to pick this one.
      - dandelion_lover 10y ago
        Of course, you have the freedom to make this choice. However > just because they may, at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then. sounds very much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
pure_ambition 10y ago
We will have to see. I was curious about this myself, but amazon does not say categorically when it streams data to the cloud. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Note that it says "this is when Alexa streams your voice to the cloud", but it does not say categorically that this is the ONLY time Alexa streams your voice to the cloud. I found that a lot of news articles said Alexa only records your voice when you make a request, but Amazon itself offers a more limited promise.
6stringmerc 10y ago
Though the article stipulates the Echo was streaming something (music?) at the time - which could infer more 'active' attention - I also think this is more of a fishing expedition. I have serious doubts that the Echo recorded anything of value. I base this perspective of having numerous interactions with Echo devices and observing how routinely poor they are at listening in even completely silent rooms. I enjoy the devices, but also scoff at the "OMG CSI TECH ENHANCE!!" spin that can kind of find its way into discussions via less-than-knowledgeable journalists. Or ones who want to amp it up. Whatever the case, I think it's kind of interesting to hear about. I do pity the audio tech who might have to get the audio file, put it in a DAW and turn it all the way up to listen for, uh, evidence. Ouch.

vidarh 10y ago

Just a few minutes ago, my Alexa triggered on a phone conversation someone was having across the room. It happens fairly regularly. While I agree it's unlikely to have caught any specific incident, do this often enough and sooner or later something will show up - the recognition is not particularly precise.

andrepd 10y ago

> The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. I wonder, how on earth do you know that, that you are able to dismiss it with such confidence as a non-issue. That's the problem with proprietary systems (proprietary always-on microphones at that). I would be surprised if they weren't actually listening and analysing and storing data from the microphone feed at all times.

danielvf 10y ago
You can just watch the network traffic from the device to see when it is streaming audio. Now this obviously doesn't rule out the device saving stuff locally, but plenty of people have verified that it does generally only send lots of data to the server when you have just asked it to wake up.
- jamornh 10y ago
  Although that does not rule out the possibility that it stores data locally and only transmit the recorded payload (since the time of last transmission) with the next legitimate payload when the wake word is spoken. Not saying that they do though since if they were discovered to be doing that, it's way too damaging for Amazon's reputation for it to be worth going through the trouble.
- ben174 10y ago
  It is possible it's doing local voice recognition on all audio, and just sending the text in their payloads. If the content is encrypted, there's no way for any network snooping to determine what they're sending.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    This is software... saying there's "no way" is usually incorrect. For example, you could root the device and disable the encryption. Or, you could perform experiments in a controlled setting where you play a series of identical recordings to Alexa and measure the statistical similarity in the outgoing data for each. The encryption scheme probably provides more entropy than just the audio, so maybe statistical analysis wouldn't help, but it's a start.
vollmond 10y ago
FWIW, I've seen a couple threads on Reddit where people did network sniffing -- the echo only had network traffic after the wakeword. So, in a hearsay/amateur manner, it seems to not be doing that. As someone else mentioned, they could of course record constantly, then compress and transmit in batches, and that would probably go unnoticed.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  > As someone else mentioned, they could of course record constantly, then compress and transmit in batches, and that would probably go unnoticed. Possibly, but it can be fingerprinted by using known audio samples and intentionally producing very large amounts of data. See my other reply.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
I hear this all the time and it boils down to what another poster said. I can monitor all the traffic going through my network. If the device was constantly streaming audio it would be very obvious. To which someone once replied to me: "But what if they aren't sending traffic through your network? What if they are using 4G or something like that?" To which I replied that while I have not personally done it. You could scan using software defined radio to detect that sort of thing. And if it was doing that someone would notice. Plus if you tore down the hardware they would notice the antenna. To which they replied "what it it uses something you can't detect with that?" To which I walked away because I didn't feel like explaining how physics works.
- idanoeman 10y ago
  How do you know they don't 1. Listen all the time 2. Use a small neural network on the device to detect when a voice is present 3. Collect this data into one zip file, then send the file when the user says "Alexa", or anything remotely close. They could even put a size limit on the data upload to reduce the variance to prevent you from ever testing whether they do this. Or, they could simply transcribe the audio on the device and upload the text. Any audio they are unsure of could be uploaded to the server to be handled by a beefier neural network.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    Yes, exactly this. They could easily just TTS what you are saying, save the text, and send it together with the rest of the info when you say "Alexa". Thus only sending information when you say "Alexa" but managing to upload all your conversations. I would be very surprised if they aren't doing something like this. The power of analysing which products you talk about in your home more often, what kind of stuff you consume, what affairs do you discuss at home, etc, is too good to pass up. And seriously frightening.
    - throwaway2016a 10y ago
      It is very well known that the actually speech processing happens on the cloud. To deploy a whole cloud voice recognition system if you have distributed network with TTS capability on the device would be quite a lot of redundant work to go through. However, with that said, unless they do certificate pinning on their device the answer to that is to MITM the device and snoop on the traffic. If they do certificate pinning the answer is: 1. Pre-record an Alexa commend 2. Play back the recording 3. Wait a minute 4. Replay the command 5. Measure the size of the packets going across the network 6. Wait a week while playing something that sounds like natural conversation - say an audio book 7. Replay the command audio file 8. Measure the amount size of data sent between the end of the second command and the end of the last It should be slightly more than the second command was to account for things like checking for updates. But if it includes the TTS (which is essentially an audio book transcribed at this point) than it would be quite a bit larger even with text compression.

LordKano 10y ago

There are too many checkers players in a chess world. They're attempting to establish the precedent today. Tomorrow(figurative, not literal), when such devices send everything to the cloud to be processed "To reduce false positives", there will be much more data to mine. I won't have one of these devices in my house. I won't have an xbone in my house for the same reason. Today, they're not much of a threat to privacy but long term, the risk is too great for my comfort. They can't be trusted.

SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
So you don't have a smartphone?
- dandelion_lover 10y ago
  Reducing the attack surface is already a good defense, even if you have a smartphone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    I don't know about you, but I have no desire to become a digital pariah and avoid useful technologies just because they may, at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then. I'm a believer in picking my battles, and see no reason whatsoever to pick this one.
    - dandelion_lover 10y ago
      Of course, you have the freedom to make this choice. However > just because they may, at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then. sounds very much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

pure_ambition 10y ago

We will have to see. I was curious about this myself, but amazon does not say categorically when it streams data to the cloud. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Note that it says "this is when Alexa streams your voice to the cloud", but it does not say categorically that this is the ONLY time Alexa streams your voice to the cloud. I found that a lot of news articles said Alexa only records your voice when you make a request, but Amazon itself offers a more limited promise.

6stringmerc 10y ago

Though the article stipulates the Echo was streaming something (music?) at the time - which could infer more 'active' attention - I also think this is more of a fishing expedition. I have serious doubts that the Echo recorded anything of value. I base this perspective of having numerous interactions with Echo devices and observing how routinely poor they are at listening in even completely silent rooms. I enjoy the devices, but also scoff at the "OMG CSI TECH ENHANCE!!" spin that can kind of find its way into discussions via less-than-knowledgeable journalists. Or ones who want to amp it up. Whatever the case, I think it's kind of interesting to hear about. I do pity the audio tech who might have to get the audio file, put it in a DAW and turn it all the way up to listen for, uh, evidence. Ouch.