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> Alexa demonstrably does not listen to your conversations I won't soon forget this story[0]. It listens to everything, and if it thinks it hears the start of

> Alexa demonstrably does not listen to your conversations I won't soon forget this story[0]. It listens to everything, and if it thinks it hears the start of a command it starts doing stuff with what it hears. That detection can have bugs, some of them practically unavoidable (like differentiating between a conversation about a person named Alexa and a command). Amazon themselves have said that "[voice] data is stored remotely" as opposed to on the device[1]. So it seems likely that most Alexa users have had at least some parts of a conversation in which they did not intend to involve Alexa stored on an Amazon server, and possibly reviewed by some number of employees[2]. I think the strongest thing you can say "demonstrably" about regarding Alexa is that it does not store _all_ your conversations. 0. https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-device-recorded-private-conversation-sent-it-out-to-random-contact/755507974/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-devic... 1. https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/2819/mystery-amazon-echo-data https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/2819/mystery-... 2. https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/ https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/

jjcon 6y ago
You mean the story where she said send message and it did just that? Yeah accidents happen but this isn’t some nefarious amazon is spying on you story. This could happen on any smart phone and isn’t unique to smart speakers or amazon. > voice data is stored remotely No, it only sends your requests to the server after the wake word is said (so that it can process it). You can test this your self by monitoring your network traffic. It is demonstrable.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  > You mean the story where she said send message and it did just that? No, the story where Alexa incorrectly interpreted some part of the conversation as a wake word, then incorrectly interpreted another bit as a send message confirmation, and finally misinterpreted yet more audio as a name in the contacts list. Alexa does screw up, and when it does it screws up in ways that are _not at all intuitive_. It bills itself as a "smart" and as an "assistant", but it doesn't fit either of these descriptions. Tech people might call it "smart", but people who employ assistants would describe it as "dangerously dumb". > No, it only sends your requests to the server after the wake word is said... This doesn't contradict "voice data is stored remotely". Nobody is arguing that it is storing everything you say remotely (though it's just one government-ordered software update away from doing just that). What it does store remotely, and what is given to thousands of fresh, temporary Amazon employees to listen to, is potentially anything you say that begins with the wake word or what it thinks might have been the wake word, within a confidence interval decided by Amazon.
_fat_santa 6y ago
I think with stuff like this it's easy to assume "evil company stealing your data". And while I'm sure that accidents happen, I also feel like Amazon knows this and will go to extreme lengths to protect their users data. Why? Imagine how much it would cost amazon in lost sales and market cap if some scandal broke about how thier Alexa device were leaking user data. Even a small story would be enough to wipe out millions if not billions of dollars of market cap and sales.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  You may be underestimating the costs of _not_ archiving large amounts of potentially-sensitive data in a way that is accessible to a large number of employees (and therefor not very secure). Alexa needs training. Training requires data, as real as possible and as much as possible. It also requires reviewers, and that review process requires a lot of person-hours. So if Amazon were to decide not to store voice recordings of real-world interactions (or potential-interactions like "my friend Alexa said..."), or if they were to decide not to make that data available broadly (to thousands of employees), then they would also be wiping out millions of dollars of market cap. The way I see it, it's not really a question of whether or not they're being cavalier with private data. For me that threshold was crossed with the large human voice-to-text farms. I don't want the list of people who might hear my private conversations that maybe contained syllables sounding like "Alexa" or "Siri" or "Google" to be thousands strong. That's orders of magnitude more than could ever be reasonably expected to constitute a secure circle.

jjcon 6y ago

You mean the story where she said send message and it did just that? Yeah accidents happen but this isn’t some nefarious amazon is spying on you story. This could happen on any smart phone and isn’t unique to smart speakers or amazon. > voice data is stored remotely No, it only sends your requests to the server after the wake word is said (so that it can process it). You can test this your self by monitoring your network traffic. It is demonstrable.

rcoveson 6y ago
> You mean the story where she said send message and it did just that? No, the story where Alexa incorrectly interpreted some part of the conversation as a wake word, then incorrectly interpreted another bit as a send message confirmation, and finally misinterpreted yet more audio as a name in the contacts list. Alexa does screw up, and when it does it screws up in ways that are _not at all intuitive_. It bills itself as a "smart" and as an "assistant", but it doesn't fit either of these descriptions. Tech people might call it "smart", but people who employ assistants would describe it as "dangerously dumb". > No, it only sends your requests to the server after the wake word is said... This doesn't contradict "voice data is stored remotely". Nobody is arguing that it is storing everything you say remotely (though it's just one government-ordered software update away from doing just that). What it does store remotely, and what is given to thousands of fresh, temporary Amazon employees to listen to, is potentially anything you say that begins with the wake word or what it thinks might have been the wake word, within a confidence interval decided by Amazon.

_fat_santa 6y ago

I think with stuff like this it's easy to assume "evil company stealing your data". And while I'm sure that accidents happen, I also feel like Amazon knows this and will go to extreme lengths to protect their users data. Why? Imagine how much it would cost amazon in lost sales and market cap if some scandal broke about how thier Alexa device were leaking user data. Even a small story would be enough to wipe out millions if not billions of dollars of market cap and sales.

rcoveson 6y ago
You may be underestimating the costs of _not_ archiving large amounts of potentially-sensitive data in a way that is accessible to a large number of employees (and therefor not very secure). Alexa needs training. Training requires data, as real as possible and as much as possible. It also requires reviewers, and that review process requires a lot of person-hours. So if Amazon were to decide not to store voice recordings of real-world interactions (or potential-interactions like "my friend Alexa said..."), or if they were to decide not to make that data available broadly (to thousands of employees), then they would also be wiping out millions of dollars of market cap. The way I see it, it's not really a question of whether or not they're being cavalier with private data. For me that threshold was crossed with the large human voice-to-text farms. I don't want the list of people who might hear my private conversations that maybe contained syllables sounding like "Alexa" or "Siri" or "Google" to be thousands strong. That's orders of magnitude more than could ever be reasonably expected to constitute a secure circle.