11 ms·
Amazon's Alexa Team Can Access Users' Home Addresses
- notatoad 8y agoSo in summary, people who amazon trusts to have access to sensitive private information have access to sensitive private information? i'm not sure why location is the scary part here, i'm more concerned that real people and not just algorithms have access to my audio recordings or transcripts from alexa.
- snazz 8y agoIt’s location plus recordings that’s potentially very useful to someone nefarious or for otherwise violating your privacy.
- tastroder 8y agoTidbit: the plural "recordings" implies access to the user's history. That's not supported by the article as far as I can see and would honestly surprise me given the task of transcription/data quality assurance and the current performance of these smart assistants.
- sagebird 8y agoYou are not incorrect but if someone gained access multiple recordings, and recordings have location data, if they gather two or more from the same person, they can piece together the history to the extent of how many recordings they capture from the same location. So the history need not be explicitly served up in a tidy package.
- tastroder 8y agoTrue, I guess it just sounds a little too hypothetical as a scenario for my taste given both Alexa's and Amazon's scale. Don't get me wrong, I still absolutely think the conversation is important and will hopefully lead to a way to deal with these requirements responsibly. These systems aren't going away and it's not like this is something unique to Amazon or even smart assistants. Not sure why we as a sector haven't had the discussion to this depth after e.g. search engines started experimenting with user query logs, the content could be used similarly harmful - and the techniques were/are likely similar.
- sagebird 8y agoI am more pessimistic. When discussions of securing user data come up, how often do people vote - limit lifetime of collected data and delete it after x days? I don’t think businesses ever choose that because they don’t want to commit to the lost opportunity to mine that data later. So what we are stuck with is security through some ad hoc set of encryption and distribution practices- ie only let the transcribers have random access to a small set of data. But then years later we discover the whole dataset is hacked, leaked or accidentally publically accessible and the only thing that would have guaranteed to protect us was - systematically deleting data, the thing they will never do.
- sagebird 8y agoFor the transcriptions to be useful they will ultimately be aggregated in some sort of data set so the analysts can have at it. So even if they somehow guaranteed the security of the raw recordings the very nature of data analysis means that somewhere there is going to be an organized collection of this data ripe for abuse if exfiltrated.
- noja 8y agoNo, people who Amazon trust to have access to voice information also have access to other information by default and automatically with no extra work.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoYou have to have an amazon account to use Alexa, so you've already established a relationship with Amazon that would include your name, email address, IP address(location).
- dx87 8y agoThat doesn't matter, restricting information that employees can access is Security 101. I can't view restricted company information that I don't need for my job, likewise people transcribing Alexa voice commands don't need the home address of the voices they are transcribing. Just because you give Amazon your address for shipping and billing information doesn't mean you want to give John and Jane on the Alexa QA team your home address.
- milkytron 8y agoIt is security 101, the sad part is how bad companies fail at this. I worked a company with over a trillion dollars in assets that had hundreds of “highly confidential” (their own words for classification) that were available to anyone on the network. I took all the appropriate courses of action to report, no action on their end. Reported it to the teams responsible and offered a solution, no action. I debated blowing a whistle and making an example, but I didn’t feel like I’d be safe. This post even makes me paranoid.
- rmc 7y agoI'm pretty sure credit card details aren't shared to all Amazon employees.
- locations 7y agoIP address is by no means an assurance of current, accurate physical location. In the sense that country and state or province might be close enough, it's certainly not accurate enough to nail down county, or zip code level accuracy with more than a coin flip's reliability. Some IP addresses are well known, and bound to physical locations like places of business, retail store fronts, starbucks wi-fi, but that's not really the purview of home assistants, when discussing the meat of these services and their intentions.
- theclaw 8y agoI think the fact that it's audio recordings makes it seem more emotive and intimate than plain text. It's like when you're on the phone to some robot booking service and a real person takes over you're suddenly embarrassed to have been talking to the robot at all.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- watertom 8y agoAt best the development team might need to know the state and city. When trying to improve the accuracy it might be helpful when to know where someone lives in order to fix geographically related mis-matches. This is just very sloppy/lazy security.
- negamax 8y agoHow are these gaps not captured early on in Amazon and similarly on Facebook. It’s like people creating these systems have no clue about the wider world.
- Gys 8y agoThey probably have a better clue then most of us. But they also have opportunism
- goshx 8y ago> “Anytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don’t want to be found,” How is this different than Amazon literally shipping packages to someone's home address and having their billing information?
- spaceheretostay 8y agoThe people who are packing the boxes and knocking on your door don't have access to the microphones inside your house. Hearing conversations and search requests from customers is quite different from knocking on their door or packing a box. Combining the knowledge of what you say inside with knowing where you live is different than the knowledge of a purchase you made and where you live. Also, I would certainly assume Amazon to know my home address if I bought Alexa and shipped it there. But most people wouldn't assume that Amazon actual employees are listening to their conversations who also know where you live. HN might expect that, but Amazon makes a privacy promise that is violated here, as described in the article: > In an April 10 statement acknowledging the Alexa auditing program, Amazon said “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.” Bloomberg is saying that this statement by Amazon was false, because the location information from the Alexa devices can, in some cases, identify the individual or account "as part of this workflow".
- ajross 8y agoTo be clear: there's no assertion of real-time access to microphones anywhere. This is a quality team that has access to some presumptive subset of recorded data. The headline and your interpretation are leaning very heavily on the "ZOMG SPYING!" angle, where... I honestly don't see it. This seems like pretty heavy spinning. Yes, they should probably have a policy of scrubbing data better before voices get presented to human ears. > Combining the knowledge of what you say inside with knowing where you live is different than the knowledge of a purchase you made and where you live. Technically true, but... is it actually worse? I can see convincing arguments made either way, frankly.
- 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- idlewords 8y agoPeople should reconsider keeping an always-on microphone operated by strangers in their home.
- negamax 8y agoThat defeats the purpose. Echo with smart home integrations is really useful
- criddell 8y agoI do that every time I see a story like this. So far the cost has never exceeded the utility.
- spaceheretostay 8y agoThe problem with your reasoning is that you won't be able to reconsider once it is too late- the damage will be done and your regret won't matter. The problem is societal, not just your comfort with your data and your microphone. The past-the-point-of-no-return could occur with decades of people becoming less and less protective of privacy, to the point where they give all apps all permissions, have microphones in the house in every room, and live in a world with constant corporate data breaches, and where our elections were hacked to take advantage of our lack of care for privacy, and government was installed without care for the foreign attacks against our sovereignty, and we lose our freedom and rule of law in the US as our government ignores public responsibility, and it turns out it all happened because we signed up for Facebook and told it our political opinions and didn't care about privacy at all, and our locations and political preferences and personal weaknesses were all sold to foreign adversaries, who created fake internet personas to convince us of false things, again because we didn't care about privacy, and then we'd live under a surveillance state run by a totalitarian regime who snubs their noses at peaceful transfer of power and states unequivocally that they will not leave office in the future, and who looks to China for a good model of total surveillance and one party for life as a good thing to "try here"....., a government who treats transgender people like they're not people, who puts children in cages if they are from Mexico, who holds the paychecks of 1million people hostage for racist political grandstanding, who actively causes harm to people for fun, who knows nothing about the dangers of fascism and who acts openly fascist... Oh wait. Fuck.
- sokoloff 8y agoIt seems like there's a legitimate use case for this data: troubleshooting/quality scoring the results for inherently local searches. "Alexa, what's the nearest pizza place?" "Alexa, is the corner coffee shop open now?" (Disclaimer: not an Amazon employee, but [generally] happy Alexa user.)
- spaceheretostay 8y ago> It seems like there's a legitimate use case for this data Maybe, but you haven't found it. To resolve your query, simply fudge the locations by 50-200m in random directions. You'll still get good local results and won't pin the exact room or house down with needlessly accurate location data. Amazon can keep that data of course, it just need not be shown to human reviewers. Edit: I'm "posting too fast" and so cannot reply to the Uber comment below. I'll say, I still don't understand how human reviewers would need your address or GPS coords to improve their service after you get an Uber. How would they even verify the Uber came to the right place, they don't have the verification info there. I just don't see this as a valid use case at all.
- c22 8y ago"Alexa, order me an Uber"
- FakeComments 8y agoThe reason a human reviewer needs that information is to troubleshoot the response. 1. Customer makes a request that requires location — “Alexa, what’s the weather?” 2. Alexa gets the response wrong — “A turkey is a flightless bird.” 3. You flag that as incorrect in the application. 4. An Amazon employee reviews that flagged response, and needs to figure out how Alexa misinterpreted — did she mishear you? ...is your location data malformed, so that interpretation was discarded? etc. I don’t see how Amazon employees can troubleshoot the Alexa application without both reviewing the audio files and the contextual information provided. Disclaimer: at one point, I reviewed security for Alexa teams. I no longer work there, my opinions are my own, etc.
- 8y ago
- notyourwork 8y agoI'm so so so tired of these articles. So a dev can listen to conversations because they write software to transcribe voice to text? Sigghhhhh....
- spaceheretostay 8y ago> I'm so so so tired of these articles. What do you mean, isn't this the first article on this topic? > So a dev can listen to conversations because they write software to transcribe voice to text? That has nothing to do with this article. This article is about exact GPS/location coordinates, has nothing to do with "a dev can listen to conversations". > Sigghhhhh.... I think you have misread the article, this is new information about a new topic. There's nothing repetitive about this news item and there's no need to sigh so heavily about people who care about privacy and the honesty of corporate statements.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>That has nothing to do with this article. This article is about exact GPS/location coordinates, has nothing to do with "a dev can listen to conversations". User: "Alexa how long does it take to drive to Walmart" Alexa: proceeds to give totally nonsensical directions to a Walmart that isn't even the nearest one
- yur3i__ 8y agoTell me what part of that process requires a human knowing my address?
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoTroubleshooting what caused it to get F'd up.
- yur3i__ 8y agoYes, when the user reports it as f'd up. Until then theres no reason for your address to be sent to some dude
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- orblivion 8y agoIt would be an interesting project to produce a documentary of what goes on inside a tech company in this regard. The very fact that this stuff is so mundane to us _should_ be alarming to everybody else. Maybe actually seeing it would generate enough controversy that segregating data according to "need-to-know" would get higher priority compared to a new feature. Or maybe they would just stop buying these awful products.
- kayhi 8y agoIs there a place that Amazon states exactly what (only trigger word, plus 5 seconds) they gather and how it is used?
- bryan_w 8y agoMaybe in their privacy policy
- antisthenes 8y agoAnd any 3rd party seller on Amazon also has access to customers' home addresses. Having my address isn't the scary part. It's having access to the content of all of my conversations inside the address that's worrying. A voice assistant is just something I'll never allow in my house. The risk/benefit ratio just isn't there. It would have to be at least an order of magnitude more useful before even considering it.
- millstone 8y ago> If a user has chosen to share their contacts with Alexa, their names, numbers and email addresses also appear in the dashboard. So my data is popping up on a dashboard even though I've never once used an Alexa? Gee thanks. A privacy-respecting design would have been: 1. Contacts never leave the device. 2. Location data is sent anonymously, in subsequent requests not associated with the initial query.
- cmroanirgo 8y ago> A privacy-respecting design would have been... Not really disagreeing with you, but every smartphone app that has access to your contacts also violates your contacts' privacy. WhatsApp, FB, Google Auto, etc, etc. More than anything, I hate the way this has been allowed as an acceptable practice.
- snaky 8y ago> We should not be sharing their contact information online. So, keep your contacts in a different database. This app saves contacts in its own database seperate from android contacts. This way no other app would be able to access contacts. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/opencontacts.open.com.opencontacts/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/opencontacts.open.com.openco...
- adrian_mrd 8y agoAny suggestions for what to do on iOS? Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to not share contacts with certain services. For instance, WhatsApp works just fine with a telephone number but it actively encourages users to upload their contacts - assumably consumed by (the) Facebook (group of businesses) as part of its social graph.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- beenBoutIT 8y agoEveryone's contacts are already out there on the internet, the cat's out of the bag and you can't change that by going way out of your way to keep your copy air-gapped. The real issue is are you getting value in exchange for handing over your data? Amazon's service isn't something that normal people use to contact friends and you can't get usable directions to a contact's address with Alexa, so IMO the ROI is pretty bad.
- cosmodisk 8y agoI may be a bit paranoid but I don't think I'd ever buy something like Echo... Every single command,ask nad sneeze can be sent back to the mothership to analyse...I,'ve already got google for that,no need one more...
- Causality1 7y agoIf a feat is simultaneously profitable and technically possible it is being performed, full stop. The government refuses to punish breaches of privacy with fines heavy enough that spying on users is no longer profitable, therefore the spying will continue.
- kalado 7y agoThis really shouldn't be news to anyone. Alexa Team also know when you are home, your work hours and when you are on vacation just by the time stamps of you using Alexa.