12 ms·

Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

318 points by BeniBoy 4y ago

davidkuennen 4y ago
Mild shock.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, monetisation and indiscriminate collection of user data should be illegal.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Why? If I run a store and I learn about my customer’s interests, why shouldn’t I use that to make better offers? I don’t know why people are so freaked out by data collection. I just can’t believe that for all the data I share, I still get such shitty ads.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    its one thing to have guest book in your store to gather feedback from your users, and totally another to follow your customers all the way back to their homes and listen what they talk about. main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      Ok, let’s take the in store analogy. Agree that following someone home to spy on them is wrong. But in store, if I see a person looking at some items on a shelf and start to tell them about related items, doesn’t that violate the need for explicit consent? Expecting “full understanding” is too high a bar, IMO. Implicit consent, public notice and opt out are sufficient. Otherwise you end up with GDPR cookie opt ins that only train people to indiscriminately push “accept” buttons.
      - doctor_eval 4y ago
        I don’t think anybody claims that you need consent to do the equivalent of displaying “other products you may like”. The customer entered the store willingly, and what you describe is quite literally the job of a shop assistant. The need for consent would come if the assistant were to record the entire conversion you have with the customer, and send it to Facebook or Amazon in exchange for money.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        I was responding to the claim about “main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.” Maybe I misunderstood.
  - mort96 4y ago
    > I don't know why people are so freaked out by living in a surveillance system where every corporation tracks their every move for profit You haven't read enough dystopic fiction.
    - mukesh610 4y ago
      Fiction isn't exactly a good argument
      - mellavora 4y ago
        Right, but perhaps the McCarthy era is? Or the civil rights movement? Or the labor movements?
      - mort96 4y ago
        A lot of fiction isn't just about "look at this whacky world I invented". Especially dystopic fiction usually tries to tell us something about our own world and its potential future. But the main point with my comment was to re-frame what was advocated, from their fantasy of "one small store owner doing the best for their customers" into "a surveillance system where every corporation tracks your every move for profit".
  - CaptainZapp 4y ago
    Ok, you own a store. A customer enters your store and buys a widget. Since you're smart and want to know everything you record the sale and add it to your database. Only that's not where it stops. After the customer leaves the store one of you minions follows him to every other store he ever enters to record what he buys, or even looks at That's why your analogy falls completely flat. Nobody would complain if it only concerns your store and your sales. But people violently dislike you snooping on everything that your customer does. Worse! He doesn't even have to be a customer of yours. You snoop anyway, even into his most private affairs.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      Worse! You report this information to government authorities, who monitor this and may decide at a future time that the things you were shopping for today mark you as a bad or suspicious person. Worse! You also share this information with credit bureaus, meaning the data is available to potential employers. Thus limiting your job options. Looked at a hookah once because you were curious? Sorry, no pot-heads in my company!
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        I don’t see the connection of this to the topic. Not trying to be obtuse. Are you saying it’s a slippery slope between targeted advertisements and 1984? In my store analogy, I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white. To recognize that data collection is not some inherent evil. And sure, to point out that a store that tries to peep in your bedroom window should be called to task.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        But your store analogy is stacking the deck in favor of your point. As the people responding to you pointed out, it falls apart when you consider all the larger implications of pervasive data collection. Would you defend the Stasi with the same language? I dont know why you're _trying_ to make this point and gaslight the people who are rightfully very concerned about the concentration of power this data collection results in
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    This a strawman. We're not talking about your friendly neighbourhood corner store here. We're talking about large scale systems with billions of users, systems that contain and shape a lot of our public discourse. The way these platforms make money inherently affects our society and our democracy. "Helping your customer" is irrelevant here.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      I thought this was a topic about Alexa (a voice UI) using your voice (actually, installed skills) to deliver more targeted ads. I don’t see the public discourse connection here?
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        It's only a matter of time before Alexa will only read you the "right" kind of news as to remain advertiser-friendly. It already happens on mainstream social media, where beyond actual illegal content, plenty of legal content but that happens to be critical of the proverbial "establishment" gets demonetized, banned or even silently shadowbanned.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        But that phenomenon isn’t specific to targeting, is it? That’s just run of the mill propaganda.
vachina 4y ago
dullynotsonumb 4y ago
Uff
baal80spam 4y ago
Say it ain't so!
malf 4y ago
Paper seems to actually show things like “If you install the Fitness skill, Amazon shows you fitness ads”, but that’s less sexy, I guess.
- mort96 4y ago
  99% of people who read your comment (including me) won't have read the paper. You should cite the parts of the paper which made you come to the conclusion that they really only showed that ads are shown based on what you install, not based on what you say otherwise.
  - almost 4y ago
    Reading the introduction section should be enough. It’s pretty clear that they’re talking about Amazon targeting ads based on your interactions with the Alexa and not, as the title here implies, based on just listening in to other things you say. The paper does talk about “voice data” which I think is a bit misleading. “Voice data” to me would imply an analysis of the sounds your voice makes directly for ad targeting purposes but it’s clear enough from the context what they actually mean. Amazon does plenty of rubish things already, no need for us to make up extra things!
    - mort96 4y ago
      From the introduction, it seems like their main concern is that "smart speakers record audio from their environment and potentially share this data with other parties over the Internet—even when they should not". They provide two examples of how that happens: 1. "Smart speaker vendors or third-parties may infer users’ sensitive physical (e.g., age, health) and psychological (e.g., mood, confidence) traits from their voice." 2. "The set of questions and commands issued to a smart speaker can reveal sensitive information about users’ states of mind, interests, and concerns." They also mention that "smart speaker platforms host malicious third-party apps", and "record users’ private conversations without their knowledge", but that's mentioned as examples of prior research and thus seems to serve more as background than something this paper is trying to prove. Point 2 is the one you're focusing on, and yeah, that's not surprising. You'd expect Amazon to build a profile on you based on the stuff you ask Echo to do (though the ethics of this certainly warrants discussion). Point 1 would be the surprising thing, that smart speakers infer information about people from their voice, rather than from the commands themselves. Their methodology seems to be to create multiple personas and compare the sorts of ads they get. In order to prove that information is inferred from traits of the voice rather than the words in the commands, they would need two personas which are identical in which commands they send but with different voices (female vs male voice, healthy vs smoker voice, something like that). From skimming section 3, it doesn't seem like they did that, so I'm forced to agree that the thing they prove in this paper (if their statistical methods are valid) is that Amazon builds an advertisement profile based on your interests as expressed in terms of which commands you're sending the device.
fxtentacle 4y ago
The problem isn't the lack of knowledge. The problem is lack of alternatives. Name a single privacy preserving smart home assistant that the average person can buy, install, and use. Market theory says people will vote with their wallet, which is why I boycott all of them. But I'm under no delusion that my behavior will change anything. Voting with your wallet only works if someone is willing to offer what you want.
- navanchauhan 4y ago
  Mycroft? [0] https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai
  - maccard 4y ago
    That falls at the first hurdle - the page you link to says shipping September 2022.
    - robin_reala 4y ago
      Mycroft have been shipping assistants since 2016: https://mycroft.ai/blog/making-a-mycroft/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/making-a-mycroft/
- greggsy 4y ago
  "Siri Data is associated with a random, device-generated identifier. This random identifier is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. Siri Data and your requests are not used to build a marketing profile, and are never sold to anyone." https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictation/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...
  - dandare 4y ago
    A single policy update can reverse all of this.
abricq 4y ago
I would be SUPER interested to see this same methodology applied to an iPhone or an Android phone resting in a room. I've already had the feeling that discussions that I had, later had an impact on my ads, but never knew if it was random or not.
- wildmanx 4y ago
  Given the power demands of such an always-on analysis engine, that would show in battery runtime. At least if it's happening while the device is not plugged in.
  - abricq 4y ago
    On iOS, the word "Siri" can be detected at any time (if set so). Maybe (just an hypothesis) there could be a set of other keywords also listened for, that once detected could start another more complex routine. Like that, you could limit the battery impact, and yet be able to listen to the users for advertising purpose.
    - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
      On my Motorola from 8 years ago, the voice command was "OK, Google" or any custom short phrase you trained for it. But I think it would be really hard to get a useful but concise list of keywords... It would certainly be possible to listen for, say, "new Subaru" and show an ad if that one thing was detected, but the point is that you want to select which one of a million ads to show you'd need far more keywords, which gets computationally expensive quickly. It would probably be more battery efficient to compress audio that sounds like speech aggressively and then send it up to The Cloud for analysis...scary stuff, and part of the reason I don't have any home assistants!
  - netsharc 4y ago
    A lot of people anecdotally believe this "they're listening", but I don't, since if it happens offline, it would consume a lot of power of the smart devices, and if it happens on the cloud, then the bandwidth and computing requirements would be gigantic and probably have poor ROI that it's not worth it. But maybe I'm overestimating those requirements. Then again, I opened Instagram at a carwash once, and a few days later I got ads about car treatment products. I walked by an e-bike store the other day and stopped for about 15 seconds to look at the bikes being displayed, and a few days later Instagram started showing me ads for the brand. I thought Instagram or another Zuck-app was tracking my location, but I just checked and none of the Zuck-apps on my phone have location permission enabled.
wodenokoto 4y ago
I’m not surprised that asking “Alexa, what is the price of a flight from Moscow to Kyiv” will be processed for advertisement and personalization purposes, but I would be surprised if “Hey, John. Did you hear the news about Ukraine?” did.
daveoc64 4y ago
What ads do Echo devices say or show? Aside from annoying suggestions like "By the way, you can ask me who the most famous person in the world is".
- entropie 4y ago
  Iam not a native english speaker, but I read the topic as Echo process voice so Amazon can server better targeted ads.
doubtfuluser 4y ago
I have the feeling, that the paper is flawed and missing an important experiment. All their results seem to rely on skills being used. There is indeed a need then for Amazon to prevent user tracking in skills (like for example Apple does and requires consent by the user). But to come to the conclusion that Amazon shares the data with advertisers I would have expected an experiment with eliminating skills as a reason and just having personas interact with Alexa core services. I guess just from shopping questions or general knowledge questions a lot of information for ad targeting could be inferred. If that’s however not influencing ads served when no skills are used, then it’s not necessarily Amazon directly sharing the information, but the skills being able to do so using Amazons provided tooling. That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.
- yunohn 4y ago
  Additionally, they are trying to imply the common trope of “voice assistants are listening to everything we say all day for ads”, whereas their test methodology was to actively use the top skills for those interests and perform actions. While I don’t like the sharing of such data for ads, it’s a far cry from Alexa processing voice in the background with zero interaction.
  - fddhjjj 4y ago
    What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything? I don’t get that. The discussion in the paper is nuanced on that point and does not make that claim as far as I read it. Section 2.2 (page 2): > The content of users’ speech can reveal sensitive information (e.g., private conversations) and the voice signals can be processed to infer potentially sensitive information about the user (e.g., age, gender, health [82]). Amazon aims to limit some of these privacy issues through its platform design choices [4]. Specifically, to avoid snooping on sensitive conversations, *voice input is only recorded when a user utters the wake word*, e.g., Alexa. Further, only processed transcriptions of voice input (not the audio data) is shared with third party skills, instead of the raw audio [32]. However, despite these design choices, prior research has also shown that smart speakers often misactivate and unintentionally record con- versations [59]. In fact, there have been several real-world instances where smart speakers recorded user conversations, without users ever uttering the wake word [63].
nairboon 4y ago
The full title is "Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem" It's about the interactions with Echos, and not as some other comments imply, about listening to general conversations passively. Although, the experiment setup might be used to study this in a future experiment.
manesioz 4y ago
Honestly I can't see why anyone has these smart speakers anyways. Best case scenario is what, saving a minute by not typing in a Google query or phone number? Doesn't seem like a sufficient benefit when you consider the downside -- a device listening to your conversations and selling that data to ad agencies.
- garciasn 4y ago
  Ad agencies hearing that I want to know the weather, dad jokes, recipes, turn on and off my lights, and to listen to smooth jazz is literally the least of my problems when it comes to data being shared/sold. Just like anything, there’s a trade off and, for the case of convenience, I’m willing to make the trade off between convenience of talking to a device to do tasks for me and having an ad agency learn what music I listen to that Amazon is probably selling to them anyway since I use the Amazon Music service. I get your skepticism and applaud it, but you have to remember 99% of the population doesn’t know, care at all, or is willing to make the trade off, whereas the 1% are some of those folks amassed here on HN. YMMV.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I upvoted specifically, because this is effectively how a lot of users see this feature ( admittedly based on anecdata ). I might even expand on it. Most users do not even see a trade-off. Most see pure benefit. But.. there is hope as jokes along the lines 'Wiretap, what is the time?' seem to have become more common.
    - garciasn 4y ago
      I know Amazon isn't doing a whole helluva lot with the data they're collecting on me via their UI nor their devices; if they were, I would have a lot better recommendations than they offer to me on the regular. Yes, recommendation engines are hard, but Amazon has the computational power, resourcing, and data to do it well, yet they're simply not. So. For now, I'm fairly convinced the data collected are useless/meaningless and I'm happy to go about my day w/o much worry. If I suddenly start seeing much better targeted recommendations, I'll rethink my strategy.
titzer 4y ago
As other commenters in the thread have pointed out, this might not be as quite a smoking gun as it would appear. However, I still feel weird with these devices in the room. I have decided I am not going to trust them, I won't ever trust them, and I'm blaming them until they show us the code. I know I'm a doomer and a fatalist, but holy crap we are sleep-walking into dystopia. Your average HNer might be a little more attuned to the possibilities for abuse here, but the billions of clueless customers and hundreds of billions of dollars to be made will just keep tempting these behemoths further over the line and renormalize all of society around pervasive surveillance capitalism. The entire psychological context of life has changed, and I'm not super OK with it, TBH.
midislack 4y ago
OOOOooooooohhh this one's really drawing a lot of damage control. Simple anecdotal evidence was enough to convince me and many other people years ago that Google and Amazon, at the very least, were spying in every way possible. Why wouldn't they? Users have technically agreed to all data collection anyway. It simply doesn't make sense to not collect data, if there is an option to.
camgunz 4y ago
I'm always surprised at others' surprise that voice assistants are data gatherers for ads (maybe except for Siri?). Isn't the entire business model just 2 things: - Gather data for ads - Corner the "smart assistant" market... so you can gather more data for ads
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Most of these companies are not lacking in the amount of data the can collect about you. I find it hard to believe that listening in on random conversations, collecting the audio stream, processing it, data mining it, accounting for substantial noise - is worth the effort for any of these companies. Maybe for a smaller startup. When you're already a $1T company - this just doesn't seem like a good or valuable data source. Not to mention, it is an OBVIOUS gigantic hit to your trust.
  - camgunz 4y ago
    Yeah I think you're right here? Maybe my loss leader presumption is wrong and it's some combination of: - We can build Echos/etc. cheaply and make a profit - We're working on speech recognition/AI anyway, so we have the data centers - We can subsidize this work by selling ad data
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > When you're already a $1T company On the other hand, maybe when you're that big you've already covered the low-hanging fruits (and so did your competitors) and now need even more?
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      This is a false assumption. It's so much easier to grow Amazon .1% than to discover a new $100M business.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    They only need to collect it and do voice recognition: the ad buyers are more than happy to buy the text and do the rest of the data mining. “Sell my product to anyone that mentions fridge” Yanno?
yosito 4y ago
Based on anecdotal experience, giving a smartphone app access to your microphone "while using the app" results in targeted ads for things you were talking about within 10-15 minutes of having the app open. I haven't done any strict science to confirm it, but I'm obsessive about privacy and can almost always track down the likely reason when I get an accurately targeted ad. I'm my opinion, it's naive to think that our voices aren't being processed by tech companies to serve ads at every opportunity. I'm glad to see some analysis proving it, and I think we need more of that because the problem definitely isn't limited to Amazon.
in9 4y ago
From what is worth, I'm a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past. I've always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion. I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams/bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands/products/services that were mentioned in those audio streams. In my understanding, showing ads for what people that are connected to you searched/bought/interacted, as in a simple network analysis, would be much cheaper and would give you very similar results.
- phkahler 4y ago
  It's not expensive at all when run on the edge device. Alexa can identify its name locally. You dont need dictation level accuracy to pick out advertising words, and if you miss some it's totally OK.
- tensor 4y ago
  This paper is studying how requests to the smart speakers are used. Smart speakers translate requests into text, and I'm assuming the ads are just keyed off the resulting requests just like they would be if you put them into the search system manually.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  Given your framing as "massive scale audio processing" to pick signals out of audio streams, I think you may have misread (or not read...) the paper. It's not claiming Alexa is listening in while inactive. It's claiming that it's inferring user characteristics (age, health, etc) from the audio of voice commands, instead of just the post-transcription text.
sjg007 4y ago
My Alexa and Facebook are spookily linked.
krnlpnc 4y ago
It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive. On several occasions I've seen ads appear based upon things being discussed, but never searched. Always with the realization I was near a smart device with a microphone (or an app with permissions) I think in hindsight this will be similar to the realization that systems like XKeyscore and PRISM were not only technically possible but already deployed.
- samirahmed 4y ago
  > It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive. If i am not mistaken - this paper seems to look at explicit "Smart Speaker interactions" - not passive background listening which is what I believe you are alluding to. Not arguing that I am saying that latter does/doesn't happen - but just that this paper is not proof of it. And there is a big difference.
- tudorconstantin 4y ago
  I think this could be implemented without listening: I am physically meeting with my friend X who is researching online for his new acquisition (or he already got it). The more obsessed he is with that, the bigger the chances he'll tell me how awesome such a thing is. So algorithms can percolate his interests to me after we meet and some time it would happen that we talked about it too.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- metadat 4y ago
  Humans are pattern recognition machines. We are so good at it that we even pickup on what seem like patterns but are actually random noise. Maybe not the best example (please chime in if you have a better one!), ha you ever shopped for a specific model of used car? Once you're on the hunt, suddenly you'll start seeing them everywhere when you're out and about, even though previously you didn't notice. There aren't more of that vehicle on the road than before, but now you're attuned to the pattern.
- 4y ago
gw67 4y ago
I work at Amazon and this not happen. It's not true.
soared 4y ago
The link below is 100% not how this happens as it’s owned by oracle, but if you’d like to read about text/nlp and how it’s used in adtech today from a technical perspective this is an excellent read. This product has been the #1 product in this space for many years. https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/corporate/acquisitions/grapeshot-methodology.pdf https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/corporate/acquisitions/gr...
loxias 4y ago
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this. A bit more than a decade ago, in a meeting at Lab126 where we were discussing a then secret future product with voice recognition -- in particular "keyword spotting", so that it could wake up on command -- I said something like: "I doubt this will work, to get high enough accuracy we'd have to stream data constantly for analysis, and consumers would have to expect this. No one would buy it." I've since learned never to underestimate the naivete of others.

318 points by BeniBoy 4y ago

Mild shock.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, monetisation and indiscriminate collection of user data should be illegal.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Why? If I run a store and I learn about my customer’s interests, why shouldn’t I use that to make better offers? I don’t know why people are so freaked out by data collection. I just can’t believe that for all the data I share, I still get such shitty ads.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  its one thing to have guest book in your store to gather feedback from your users, and totally another to follow your customers all the way back to their homes and listen what they talk about. main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Ok, let’s take the in store analogy. Agree that following someone home to spy on them is wrong. But in store, if I see a person looking at some items on a shelf and start to tell them about related items, doesn’t that violate the need for explicit consent? Expecting “full understanding” is too high a bar, IMO. Implicit consent, public notice and opt out are sufficient. Otherwise you end up with GDPR cookie opt ins that only train people to indiscriminately push “accept” buttons.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      I don’t think anybody claims that you need consent to do the equivalent of displaying “other products you may like”. The customer entered the store willingly, and what you describe is quite literally the job of a shop assistant. The need for consent would come if the assistant were to record the entire conversion you have with the customer, and send it to Facebook or Amazon in exchange for money.
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        I was responding to the claim about “main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.” Maybe I misunderstood.
- mort96 4y ago
  > I don't know why people are so freaked out by living in a surveillance system where every corporation tracks their every move for profit You haven't read enough dystopic fiction.
  - mukesh610 4y ago
    Fiction isn't exactly a good argument
    - mellavora 4y ago
      Right, but perhaps the McCarthy era is? Or the civil rights movement? Or the labor movements?
    - mort96 4y ago
      A lot of fiction isn't just about "look at this whacky world I invented". Especially dystopic fiction usually tries to tell us something about our own world and its potential future. But the main point with my comment was to re-frame what was advocated, from their fantasy of "one small store owner doing the best for their customers" into "a surveillance system where every corporation tracks your every move for profit".
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  Ok, you own a store. A customer enters your store and buys a widget. Since you're smart and want to know everything you record the sale and add it to your database. Only that's not where it stops. After the customer leaves the store one of you minions follows him to every other store he ever enters to record what he buys, or even looks at That's why your analogy falls completely flat. Nobody would complain if it only concerns your store and your sales. But people violently dislike you snooping on everything that your customer does. Worse! He doesn't even have to be a customer of yours. You snoop anyway, even into his most private affairs.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Worse! You report this information to government authorities, who monitor this and may decide at a future time that the things you were shopping for today mark you as a bad or suspicious person. Worse! You also share this information with credit bureaus, meaning the data is available to potential employers. Thus limiting your job options. Looked at a hookah once because you were curious? Sorry, no pot-heads in my company!
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      I don’t see the connection of this to the topic. Not trying to be obtuse. Are you saying it’s a slippery slope between targeted advertisements and 1984? In my store analogy, I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white. To recognize that data collection is not some inherent evil. And sure, to point out that a store that tries to peep in your bedroom window should be called to task.
      - snapcaster 4y ago
        But your store analogy is stacking the deck in favor of your point. As the people responding to you pointed out, it falls apart when you consider all the larger implications of pervasive data collection. Would you defend the Stasi with the same language? I dont know why you're _trying_ to make this point and gaslight the people who are rightfully very concerned about the concentration of power this data collection results in
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  This a strawman. We're not talking about your friendly neighbourhood corner store here. We're talking about large scale systems with billions of users, systems that contain and shape a lot of our public discourse. The way these platforms make money inherently affects our society and our democracy. "Helping your customer" is irrelevant here.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    I thought this was a topic about Alexa (a voice UI) using your voice (actually, installed skills) to deliver more targeted ads. I don’t see the public discourse connection here?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      It's only a matter of time before Alexa will only read you the "right" kind of news as to remain advertiser-friendly. It already happens on mainstream social media, where beyond actual illegal content, plenty of legal content but that happens to be critical of the proverbial "establishment" gets demonetized, banned or even silently shadowbanned.
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        But that phenomenon isn’t specific to targeting, is it? That’s just run of the mill propaganda.

vachina 4y ago

dullynotsonumb 4y ago

Uff

baal80spam 4y ago

Say it ain't so!

malf 4y ago

Paper seems to actually show things like “If you install the Fitness skill, Amazon shows you fitness ads”, but that’s less sexy, I guess.

mort96 4y ago
99% of people who read your comment (including me) won't have read the paper. You should cite the parts of the paper which made you come to the conclusion that they really only showed that ads are shown based on what you install, not based on what you say otherwise.
- almost 4y ago
  Reading the introduction section should be enough. It’s pretty clear that they’re talking about Amazon targeting ads based on your interactions with the Alexa and not, as the title here implies, based on just listening in to other things you say. The paper does talk about “voice data” which I think is a bit misleading. “Voice data” to me would imply an analysis of the sounds your voice makes directly for ad targeting purposes but it’s clear enough from the context what they actually mean. Amazon does plenty of rubish things already, no need for us to make up extra things!
  - mort96 4y ago
    From the introduction, it seems like their main concern is that "smart speakers record audio from their environment and potentially share this data with other parties over the Internet—even when they should not". They provide two examples of how that happens: 1. "Smart speaker vendors or third-parties may infer users’ sensitive physical (e.g., age, health) and psychological (e.g., mood, confidence) traits from their voice." 2. "The set of questions and commands issued to a smart speaker can reveal sensitive information about users’ states of mind, interests, and concerns." They also mention that "smart speaker platforms host malicious third-party apps", and "record users’ private conversations without their knowledge", but that's mentioned as examples of prior research and thus seems to serve more as background than something this paper is trying to prove. Point 2 is the one you're focusing on, and yeah, that's not surprising. You'd expect Amazon to build a profile on you based on the stuff you ask Echo to do (though the ethics of this certainly warrants discussion). Point 1 would be the surprising thing, that smart speakers infer information about people from their voice, rather than from the commands themselves. Their methodology seems to be to create multiple personas and compare the sorts of ads they get. In order to prove that information is inferred from traits of the voice rather than the words in the commands, they would need two personas which are identical in which commands they send but with different voices (female vs male voice, healthy vs smoker voice, something like that). From skimming section 3, it doesn't seem like they did that, so I'm forced to agree that the thing they prove in this paper (if their statistical methods are valid) is that Amazon builds an advertisement profile based on your interests as expressed in terms of which commands you're sending the device.

fxtentacle 4y ago

The problem isn't the lack of knowledge. The problem is lack of alternatives. Name a single privacy preserving smart home assistant that the average person can buy, install, and use. Market theory says people will vote with their wallet, which is why I boycott all of them. But I'm under no delusion that my behavior will change anything. Voting with your wallet only works if someone is willing to offer what you want.

navanchauhan 4y ago
Mycroft? [0] https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai
- maccard 4y ago
  That falls at the first hurdle - the page you link to says shipping September 2022.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Mycroft have been shipping assistants since 2016: https://mycroft.ai/blog/making-a-mycroft/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/making-a-mycroft/
greggsy 4y ago
"Siri Data is associated with a random, device-generated identifier. This random identifier is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. Siri Data and your requests are not used to build a marketing profile, and are never sold to anyone." https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictation/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...
- dandare 4y ago
  A single policy update can reverse all of this.

abricq 4y ago

I would be SUPER interested to see this same methodology applied to an iPhone or an Android phone resting in a room. I've already had the feeling that discussions that I had, later had an impact on my ads, but never knew if it was random or not.

wildmanx 4y ago
Given the power demands of such an always-on analysis engine, that would show in battery runtime. At least if it's happening while the device is not plugged in.
- abricq 4y ago
  On iOS, the word "Siri" can be detected at any time (if set so). Maybe (just an hypothesis) there could be a set of other keywords also listened for, that once detected could start another more complex routine. Like that, you could limit the battery impact, and yet be able to listen to the users for advertising purpose.
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    On my Motorola from 8 years ago, the voice command was "OK, Google" or any custom short phrase you trained for it. But I think it would be really hard to get a useful but concise list of keywords... It would certainly be possible to listen for, say, "new Subaru" and show an ad if that one thing was detected, but the point is that you want to select which one of a million ads to show you'd need far more keywords, which gets computationally expensive quickly. It would probably be more battery efficient to compress audio that sounds like speech aggressively and then send it up to The Cloud for analysis...scary stuff, and part of the reason I don't have any home assistants!
- netsharc 4y ago
  A lot of people anecdotally believe this "they're listening", but I don't, since if it happens offline, it would consume a lot of power of the smart devices, and if it happens on the cloud, then the bandwidth and computing requirements would be gigantic and probably have poor ROI that it's not worth it. But maybe I'm overestimating those requirements. Then again, I opened Instagram at a carwash once, and a few days later I got ads about car treatment products. I walked by an e-bike store the other day and stopped for about 15 seconds to look at the bikes being displayed, and a few days later Instagram started showing me ads for the brand. I thought Instagram or another Zuck-app was tracking my location, but I just checked and none of the Zuck-apps on my phone have location permission enabled.

wodenokoto 4y ago

I’m not surprised that asking “Alexa, what is the price of a flight from Moscow to Kyiv” will be processed for advertisement and personalization purposes, but I would be surprised if “Hey, John. Did you hear the news about Ukraine?” did.

daveoc64 4y ago

What ads do Echo devices say or show? Aside from annoying suggestions like "By the way, you can ask me who the most famous person in the world is".

entropie 4y ago
Iam not a native english speaker, but I read the topic as Echo process voice so Amazon can server better targeted ads.

doubtfuluser 4y ago

I have the feeling, that the paper is flawed and missing an important experiment. All their results seem to rely on skills being used. There is indeed a need then for Amazon to prevent user tracking in skills (like for example Apple does and requires consent by the user). But to come to the conclusion that Amazon shares the data with advertisers I would have expected an experiment with eliminating skills as a reason and just having personas interact with Alexa core services. I guess just from shopping questions or general knowledge questions a lot of information for ad targeting could be inferred. If that’s however not influencing ads served when no skills are used, then it’s not necessarily Amazon directly sharing the information, but the skills being able to do so using Amazons provided tooling. That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.

yunohn 4y ago
Additionally, they are trying to imply the common trope of “voice assistants are listening to everything we say all day for ads”, whereas their test methodology was to actively use the top skills for those interests and perform actions. While I don’t like the sharing of such data for ads, it’s a far cry from Alexa processing voice in the background with zero interaction.
- fddhjjj 4y ago
  What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything? I don’t get that. The discussion in the paper is nuanced on that point and does not make that claim as far as I read it. Section 2.2 (page 2): > The content of users’ speech can reveal sensitive information (e.g., private conversations) and the voice signals can be processed to infer potentially sensitive information about the user (e.g., age, gender, health [82]). Amazon aims to limit some of these privacy issues through its platform design choices [4]. Specifically, to avoid snooping on sensitive conversations, *voice input is only recorded when a user utters the wake word*, e.g., Alexa. Further, only processed transcriptions of voice input (not the audio data) is shared with third party skills, instead of the raw audio [32]. However, despite these design choices, prior research has also shown that smart speakers often misactivate and unintentionally record con- versations [59]. In fact, there have been several real-world instances where smart speakers recorded user conversations, without users ever uttering the wake word [63].

nairboon 4y ago

The full title is "Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem" It's about the interactions with Echos, and not as some other comments imply, about listening to general conversations passively. Although, the experiment setup might be used to study this in a future experiment.

manesioz 4y ago

Honestly I can't see why anyone has these smart speakers anyways. Best case scenario is what, saving a minute by not typing in a Google query or phone number? Doesn't seem like a sufficient benefit when you consider the downside -- a device listening to your conversations and selling that data to ad agencies.

garciasn 4y ago
Ad agencies hearing that I want to know the weather, dad jokes, recipes, turn on and off my lights, and to listen to smooth jazz is literally the least of my problems when it comes to data being shared/sold. Just like anything, there’s a trade off and, for the case of convenience, I’m willing to make the trade off between convenience of talking to a device to do tasks for me and having an ad agency learn what music I listen to that Amazon is probably selling to them anyway since I use the Amazon Music service. I get your skepticism and applaud it, but you have to remember 99% of the population doesn’t know, care at all, or is willing to make the trade off, whereas the 1% are some of those folks amassed here on HN. YMMV.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I upvoted specifically, because this is effectively how a lot of users see this feature ( admittedly based on anecdata ). I might even expand on it. Most users do not even see a trade-off. Most see pure benefit. But.. there is hope as jokes along the lines 'Wiretap, what is the time?' seem to have become more common.
  - garciasn 4y ago
    I know Amazon isn't doing a whole helluva lot with the data they're collecting on me via their UI nor their devices; if they were, I would have a lot better recommendations than they offer to me on the regular. Yes, recommendation engines are hard, but Amazon has the computational power, resourcing, and data to do it well, yet they're simply not. So. For now, I'm fairly convinced the data collected are useless/meaningless and I'm happy to go about my day w/o much worry. If I suddenly start seeing much better targeted recommendations, I'll rethink my strategy.

titzer 4y ago

As other commenters in the thread have pointed out, this might not be as quite a smoking gun as it would appear. However, I still feel weird with these devices in the room. I have decided I am not going to trust them, I won't ever trust them, and I'm blaming them until they show us the code. I know I'm a doomer and a fatalist, but holy crap we are sleep-walking into dystopia. Your average HNer might be a little more attuned to the possibilities for abuse here, but the billions of clueless customers and hundreds of billions of dollars to be made will just keep tempting these behemoths further over the line and renormalize all of society around pervasive surveillance capitalism. The entire psychological context of life has changed, and I'm not super OK with it, TBH.

midislack 4y ago

OOOOooooooohhh this one's really drawing a lot of damage control. Simple anecdotal evidence was enough to convince me and many other people years ago that Google and Amazon, at the very least, were spying in every way possible. Why wouldn't they? Users have technically agreed to all data collection anyway. It simply doesn't make sense to not collect data, if there is an option to.

camgunz 4y ago

I'm always surprised at others' surprise that voice assistants are data gatherers for ads (maybe except for Siri?). Isn't the entire business model just 2 things: - Gather data for ads - Corner the "smart assistant" market... so you can gather more data for ads

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Most of these companies are not lacking in the amount of data the can collect about you. I find it hard to believe that listening in on random conversations, collecting the audio stream, processing it, data mining it, accounting for substantial noise - is worth the effort for any of these companies. Maybe for a smaller startup. When you're already a $1T company - this just doesn't seem like a good or valuable data source. Not to mention, it is an OBVIOUS gigantic hit to your trust.
- camgunz 4y ago
  Yeah I think you're right here? Maybe my loss leader presumption is wrong and it's some combination of: - We can build Echos/etc. cheaply and make a profit - We're working on speech recognition/AI anyway, so we have the data centers - We can subsidize this work by selling ad data
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > When you're already a $1T company On the other hand, maybe when you're that big you've already covered the low-hanging fruits (and so did your competitors) and now need even more?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    This is a false assumption. It's so much easier to grow Amazon .1% than to discover a new $100M business.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  They only need to collect it and do voice recognition: the ad buyers are more than happy to buy the text and do the rest of the data mining. “Sell my product to anyone that mentions fridge” Yanno?

yosito 4y ago

Based on anecdotal experience, giving a smartphone app access to your microphone "while using the app" results in targeted ads for things you were talking about within 10-15 minutes of having the app open. I haven't done any strict science to confirm it, but I'm obsessive about privacy and can almost always track down the likely reason when I get an accurately targeted ad. I'm my opinion, it's naive to think that our voices aren't being processed by tech companies to serve ads at every opportunity. I'm glad to see some analysis proving it, and I think we need more of that because the problem definitely isn't limited to Amazon.

in9 4y ago

From what is worth, I'm a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past. I've always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion. I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams/bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands/products/services that were mentioned in those audio streams. In my understanding, showing ads for what people that are connected to you searched/bought/interacted, as in a simple network analysis, would be much cheaper and would give you very similar results.

phkahler 4y ago
It's not expensive at all when run on the edge device. Alexa can identify its name locally. You dont need dictation level accuracy to pick out advertising words, and if you miss some it's totally OK.
tensor 4y ago
This paper is studying how requests to the smart speakers are used. Smart speakers translate requests into text, and I'm assuming the ads are just keyed off the resulting requests just like they would be if you put them into the search system manually.
wutbrodo 4y ago
Given your framing as "massive scale audio processing" to pick signals out of audio streams, I think you may have misread (or not read...) the paper. It's not claiming Alexa is listening in while inactive. It's claiming that it's inferring user characteristics (age, health, etc) from the audio of voice commands, instead of just the post-transcription text.

sjg007 4y ago

My Alexa and Facebook are spookily linked.

krnlpnc 4y ago

It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive. On several occasions I've seen ads appear based upon things being discussed, but never searched. Always with the realization I was near a smart device with a microphone (or an app with permissions) I think in hindsight this will be similar to the realization that systems like XKeyscore and PRISM were not only technically possible but already deployed.

samirahmed 4y ago
> It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive. If i am not mistaken - this paper seems to look at explicit "Smart Speaker interactions" - not passive background listening which is what I believe you are alluding to. Not arguing that I am saying that latter does/doesn't happen - but just that this paper is not proof of it. And there is a big difference.
tudorconstantin 4y ago
I think this could be implemented without listening: I am physically meeting with my friend X who is researching online for his new acquisition (or he already got it). The more obsessed he is with that, the bigger the chances he'll tell me how awesome such a thing is. So algorithms can percolate his interests to me after we meet and some time it would happen that we talked about it too.
deleted 4y ago
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metadat 4y ago
Humans are pattern recognition machines. We are so good at it that we even pickup on what seem like patterns but are actually random noise. Maybe not the best example (please chime in if you have a better one!), ha you ever shopped for a specific model of used car? Once you're on the hunt, suddenly you'll start seeing them everywhere when you're out and about, even though previously you didn't notice. There aren't more of that vehicle on the road than before, but now you're attuned to the pattern.
4y ago

gw67 4y ago

I work at Amazon and this not happen. It's not true.

soared 4y ago

The link below is 100% not how this happens as it’s owned by oracle, but if you’d like to read about text/nlp and how it’s used in adtech today from a technical perspective this is an excellent read. This product has been the #1 product in this space for many years. https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/corporate/acquisitions/grapeshot-methodology.pdf https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/corporate/acquisitions/gr...

loxias 4y ago

I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this. A bit more than a decade ago, in a meeting at Lab126 where we were discussing a then secret future product with voice recognition -- in particular "keyword spotting", so that it could wake up on command -- I said something like: "I doubt this will work, to get high enough accuracy we'd have to stream data constantly for analysis, and consumers would have to expect this. No one would buy it." I've since learned never to underestimate the naivete of others.