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In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying; I think it would be hard to argue that it's recording without consent if you set it u

In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying; I think it would be hard to argue that it's recording without consent if you set it up in your own home, or interacted with it in somebody else's home, or in public (where you wouldn't have an expectation of privacy anyhow). It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms.

wallace_f 8y ago
Ok but there's a distinction to be made. Right now on the front page of HN is a thread about LEO using Google data. Most people probably think the data they're handing over to big tech is just used for an immediate, apparent purpose. Not stored and shared.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Maybe these companies have some responsibility to push awareness in the faces of the customers, that the only way to offer these services reliably is to study actual user stimulus. I don't understand why people have so little restraint though. If you don't like these devices (I don't like them, and don't want one in my own home), then you can't complain when the things you don't like about them come to bite you in the ass. I can understand being upset at being subtly betrayed by some ubiquitous and inescapable tool, some might argue that social media sites are becoming an effective privately-owned public square, deserving of some of the protections that offers (as established by the norms of the courts); but in this case you have absolutely every right and convenience not to buy personal assistant terminals and fit them in your homes. I don't trust smartphones, so I don't use them as phones; there are certain banks here in Canada I won't do business with because of bad reputations. It's all well and good to be concerned about a product, but if you're not willing to walk away from a luxury good which is not essential in your life, even though it violates your basic principles of good living, you have nobody to blame but yourself. If you won't take the most basic, simple, and convenient steps to uphold your principles, do you really have any?
  - ericd 8y ago
    I refuse to have one of these in my house, but that doesn't mean I can reasonably escape being recorded without my consent - a large percentage of the people I know have these things. The reasonable thing to do is to make it so that these don't transmit recordings, or at the very least, that there are hard promises made to not store the recordings. If the companies need training data, they can go spend the money to hire people to provide samples.
MereInterest 8y ago
>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded, and for that keylog to be accessible to the manufacturer of the keyboard, their employees, and their contractors.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the same.
  - MereInterest 8y ago
    The type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy. - Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event, setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to - Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results. In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Totally agree. The raw audio shouldn't be sent back or at a minimum not stored.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        The speech recognition is running remotely, only wakeword recognition is local on most of the devices.
zorpner 8y ago
A friend of mine is named Alexa. Is this consent?
marcinzm 8y ago
>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone. Don't put a Google Home in babushka's apartment, she wasn't going to buy one anyway, and she doesn't need it!
tbyehl 8y ago
How about when it mistakenly decides the trigger word was uttered? Or when someone on the television or a YouTube video says the trigger word?
- SargeZT 8y ago
  For someone to be criminally liable you have to show that they knowingly recorded somebody without their consent. An accidental trigger would definitely not qualify. For them to be liable civilly you'd have to show that you suffered some harm from the accidental recording and that they were negligent in allowing it to happen, and I have a very hard time believing that there are many situations where that's possible.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Are you specifically referring to these laws in each state? Becase negligence can lead to criminal liability without intent depending on the statute.
    - SargeZT 8y ago
      I am referring to the laws specifically. California's law specifically states that a beep is sufficient to establish recording notification, so that one is out; Florida's law requires intention; as do Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Washington is the only state where it isn't totally 100% clear, and the law seems to read that a tone would be sufficient to establish consent.
nfoz 8y ago
> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, Alexa is the name of my friend's one-year-old daughter. It's short for Alexandra, but that's what we call her. So yes I've said that name a lot in a variety of different places, and never expected to be recorded.
lazyjones 8y ago
> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, There is a certain spectrum of possibilities for how Alexa can handle this audio, all plausible and not equally worthy of consent: from immediate offline processing after explicit activation (never even record a whole command, just as much as is needed and never start processing unless a trigger word was said) to uploading everything to Amazon (including things that may or may not have been trigger words) and having employees listen in on private conversations. Non-IT-people won't be able to know exactly what they're supposedly consenting to, nor whether what Amazon and Google are doing is actually necessary for their gadget to function.
phkahler 8y ago
>> In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying No. Just no. When voice recognition is done locally there is no reason to record you and certainly no reason to send those recordings to the cloud. Most Alexa users didn't know it was recording them until stories broke about it. If recording is "the whole purpose" of the device I think the public has been terribly lied to.

wallace_f 8y ago

Ok but there's a distinction to be made. Right now on the front page of HN is a thread about LEO using Google data. Most people probably think the data they're handing over to big tech is just used for an immediate, apparent purpose. Not stored and shared.

microcolonel 8y ago
Maybe these companies have some responsibility to push awareness in the faces of the customers, that the only way to offer these services reliably is to study actual user stimulus. I don't understand why people have so little restraint though. If you don't like these devices (I don't like them, and don't want one in my own home), then you can't complain when the things you don't like about them come to bite you in the ass. I can understand being upset at being subtly betrayed by some ubiquitous and inescapable tool, some might argue that social media sites are becoming an effective privately-owned public square, deserving of some of the protections that offers (as established by the norms of the courts); but in this case you have absolutely every right and convenience not to buy personal assistant terminals and fit them in your homes. I don't trust smartphones, so I don't use them as phones; there are certain banks here in Canada I won't do business with because of bad reputations. It's all well and good to be concerned about a product, but if you're not willing to walk away from a luxury good which is not essential in your life, even though it violates your basic principles of good living, you have nobody to blame but yourself. If you won't take the most basic, simple, and convenient steps to uphold your principles, do you really have any?
- ericd 8y ago
  I refuse to have one of these in my house, but that doesn't mean I can reasonably escape being recorded without my consent - a large percentage of the people I know have these things. The reasonable thing to do is to make it so that these don't transmit recordings, or at the very least, that there are hard promises made to not store the recordings. If the companies need training data, they can go spend the money to hire people to provide samples.

MereInterest 8y ago

>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded, and for that keylog to be accessible to the manufacturer of the keyboard, their employees, and their contractors.

microcolonel 8y ago
> Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the same.
- MereInterest 8y ago
  The type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy. - Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event, setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to - Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results. In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Totally agree. The raw audio shouldn't be sent back or at a minimum not stored.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      The speech recognition is running remotely, only wakeword recognition is local on most of the devices.

zorpner 8y ago

A friend of mine is named Alexa. Is this consent?

marcinzm 8y ago

>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone.

microcolonel 8y ago
> That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone. Don't put a Google Home in babushka's apartment, she wasn't going to buy one anyway, and she doesn't need it!

tbyehl 8y ago

How about when it mistakenly decides the trigger word was uttered? Or when someone on the television or a YouTube video says the trigger word?

SargeZT 8y ago
For someone to be criminally liable you have to show that they knowingly recorded somebody without their consent. An accidental trigger would definitely not qualify. For them to be liable civilly you'd have to show that you suffered some harm from the accidental recording and that they were negligent in allowing it to happen, and I have a very hard time believing that there are many situations where that's possible.
- Retric 8y ago
  Are you specifically referring to these laws in each state? Becase negligence can lead to criminal liability without intent depending on the statute.
  - SargeZT 8y ago
    I am referring to the laws specifically. California's law specifically states that a beep is sufficient to establish recording notification, so that one is out; Florida's law requires intention; as do Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Washington is the only state where it isn't totally 100% clear, and the law seems to read that a tone would be sufficient to establish consent.

nfoz 8y ago

> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, Alexa is the name of my friend's one-year-old daughter. It's short for Alexandra, but that's what we call her. So yes I've said that name a lot in a variety of different places, and never expected to be recorded.

lazyjones 8y ago

> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, There is a certain spectrum of possibilities for how Alexa can handle this audio, all plausible and not equally worthy of consent: from immediate offline processing after explicit activation (never even record a whole command, just as much as is needed and never start processing unless a trigger word was said) to uploading everything to Amazon (including things that may or may not have been trigger words) and having employees listen in on private conversations. Non-IT-people won't be able to know exactly what they're supposedly consenting to, nor whether what Amazon and Google are doing is actually necessary for their gadget to function.

phkahler 8y ago

>> In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying No. Just no. When voice recognition is done locally there is no reason to record you and certainly no reason to send those recordings to the cloud. Most Alexa users didn't know it was recording them until stories broke about it. If recording is "the whole purpose" of the device I think the public has been terribly lied to.