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> From a consumer point-of-view, it’s hard to imagine Alexa becoming so useful that we’d come running when it summons us. But Alexa‘s primary mission will alway
by kennu 7y ago
> From a consumer point-of-view, it’s hard to imagine Alexa becoming so useful that we’d come running when it summons us. But Alexa‘s primary mission will always be to gather data. Simply put: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all trillion dollar companies because data is the most valuable resource in the world, and Alexa is among the world’s greatest data collectors.
I think the article misses the point here. Alexa is not supposed to summon you anywhere, it's supposed to be omnipresent like the "computer" in Star Trek. Being more proactive would just be similar to receiving smartphone push notifications. Maybe the real worry is about getting too many of those notifications from Alexa, which is obviously something Amazon needs to be careful with.
I also couldn't find any mention of Alexa being "among the world's greatest data collectors" in the referred infographic. I don't doubt that it collects a lot of data in terms of terabytes since it's all audio, but is there really so much information content in those commands people occasionally utter to it?
- rco8786 7y ago> but is there really so much information content in those commands people occasionally utter to it? You forget that those devices are always on, always listening.
- kennu 7y agoYeah, they're half-on listening for the wakeword, but they don't send the audio anywhere until you utter it.
- AlexandrB 7y agoThis is not only something you largely have to trust Amazon's word on but a limitation that can be removed at any time via OTA update.
- kennu 7y agoI don't think that's entirely true. People have analyzed the network traffic and found it to match the wakewords. The hardware and software architecture has also been analyzed and my understanding is that the wakeword functionality is implemented by secondary low-power hardware, which turns on the main system only after hearing the wakeword. Of course, anything is possible in theory and I wouldn't be surprised to see some targeted attacks happening occasionally, but that's pretty different from massive always-on 24/7 audio collection from all consumers. Some related links: https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does-amazon-echo-send-data-in-silent-mode/ https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does-amaz... https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08696 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08696
- teucris 7y agoDo you think that people care about the difference between only detecting wakewords and actual continual listening? My understanding from people I’ve talked to with smart speakers in their homes is that they’ve accepted that it’s listening all the time.
- kennu 7y agoI'm sure people have different feelings about it. My personal view is that you can listen to anyone using the microphones in their computers and smartphones anyway (with a targeted attack) and nobody is unhackable. At the same time I think people have become more privacy-aware in general and started to demand less bulk data collection. So they might accept certain risks of getting hacked but not necessarily submit to terms of service that allow bulk collection.
- wlesieutre 7y agoMinor but important correction - until it thinks you utter it. If it misheard you it can do bad things: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/amazon-alexa-recorded-conversation https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/amazon-al...
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoThat’s such a short sighted cop out to a legitimate threat. When you make the argument that “no one said the keyword so it isn’t uploading!”, you aren’t considering that it’s listening for voices, your voice, your SO’s voice, how many unique voices, what time they are talking, what temperature it is, if there is a TV or music on, what station it’s on via pattern recognition, all manner of meta data that DOES NOT require a keyword or a large outgoing data stream. It could store meta data for days and dump it with a single MQTT packet which it’s sending all the time, and they’re all encrypted. We flat out have no idea what these things are doing on the data collection end that doesn’t have to do with someone saying “Alexa” first.
- kennu 7y agoI think you're right, I was only thinking about raw audio being uploaded to the cloud. In the future, there might be more and more local machine learning happening on the devices and the extracted metadata being uploaded unnoticed. On the other hand, I still think people can analyze the hardware and software running on the devices. If there are "black boxes" doing something unknown, we should be worried, particularly if they are always powered on and have the processing capability to analyze audio content. Still, the original claim in the article was that there is a lot of this metadata being uploaded right now. I don't think anybody has verified that claim, even if it could be true.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWell, the Ferengi in Star Trek don't seem to be using voice interfaces to their computers, and maybe perhaps there's a (in-universe) reason for that. Our civilization is much more like the Ferengi than anything else in Star Trek, so I'm not all too happy about how voice interfaces are turning out.