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What you are saying is technologically correct, possible and prevalent but I couldn't find Amazon saying it anywhere on their page. Can you point me to the part

by r0h1n 12y ago

What you are saying is technologically correct, possible and prevalent but I couldn't find Amazon saying it anywhere on their page. Can you point me to the part where Amazon says nothing is ever stored/transmitted unless "Alexa" is spoken?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jasode 12y ago
I noticed that your profile mentioned "recording engineer" so maybe some concrete numbers related to digital audio technology will put boundaries on plausible scenarios. We assume either of 2 engineering designs: (#1) the trigger word "Alexa" is detected within an embedded chip. The DSP (digital signal processing) intelligence for analyzing sound waveforms is inside the device. Therefore, the words spoken after "Alexa" are then sent to the cloud. (#2) the trigger word "Alexa" (and/or other words) are detected remotely via cloud computers. There is no "smart" DSP chip within the Echo device. That means that the device must send a constant 24/7 stream of digital waveforms to the cloud. If we continue on the #2 scenario, we can guesstimate what data transfer volumes would look like. To be conservative, we use 8kHz 8-bit audio as the parameters which is telephone quality. (Reliable voice recognition probably requires inputs with greater audio fidelity e.g. 16-bit 32kHz but we'll keep the 8kHz-8bit as a possible lower bound.) Using 8kHz-8bit, it means that the device would have to stream 691 megabytes a day which leads to 20.7 gigabytes a month. Likewise on the back end, the amazon infrastructure would have to scale up to constantly analyze millions of parallel 24/7 digital waveforms. The amazon datacenters would be burning up terawatts of electricity to ignore the 99.99% of digital waveforms that is not the word "Alexa". So, are there any consumer devices out there surreptitiously uploading 691 megabytes of digital waveforms (or any data) every single day? Is it realistic that Amazon would engineer the product to work like this? I have a router that has a fallback option to a cellular connection in case my cable is disrupted. I and others would hate to get a surprise bill from Verizon/AT&T for going over my 2GB/month transfer limit if the amazon device was designed via scenario #2. EDIT TO ADD scenario #3: (#3) there are unpublicized/secret list of words in addition to the documented "Alexa" within the embedded chip's "vocabulary". Such words might be "vacation" and "book" and depending on the subsequent words sent to the cloud, you'd see ads for suntan lotion or Stephen King novels on your next visit to amazon.com. The chip's vocabulary may also include listening for transient sounds like dog barks or sneezes. You'd then get ads for dog food and cold medicine. In this scenario, a constant digital waveform is not uploaded 24/7 but extra trigger keywords unknown to the consumer causes more data to be sent than he/she agreed to.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day. You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening. Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are: * This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to) * That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands) * That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely) * That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.) * That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream * That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above * That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media Fucking. Seriously? If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    You do realise that it doesn't need to be streaming 48kHz 24 bit audio back up don't you? It could be something really low, like GSM which is 13.2 kbit/s. AMR is even lower! So to stream audio at the threshold where it is still legible, it doesn't need masses and masses of data as you presume.
slouch 12y ago
"prove this doesn't happen"

by r0h1n 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jasode 12y ago

I noticed that your profile mentioned "recording engineer" so maybe some concrete numbers related to digital audio technology will put boundaries on plausible scenarios. We assume either of 2 engineering designs: (#1) the trigger word "Alexa" is detected within an embedded chip. The DSP (digital signal processing) intelligence for analyzing sound waveforms is inside the device. Therefore, the words spoken after "Alexa" are then sent to the cloud. (#2) the trigger word "Alexa" (and/or other words) are detected remotely via cloud computers. There is no "smart" DSP chip within the Echo device. That means that the device must send a constant 24/7 stream of digital waveforms to the cloud. If we continue on the #2 scenario, we can guesstimate what data transfer volumes would look like. To be conservative, we use 8kHz 8-bit audio as the parameters which is telephone quality. (Reliable voice recognition probably requires inputs with greater audio fidelity e.g. 16-bit 32kHz but we'll keep the 8kHz-8bit as a possible lower bound.) Using 8kHz-8bit, it means that the device would have to stream 691 megabytes a day which leads to 20.7 gigabytes a month. Likewise on the back end, the amazon infrastructure would have to scale up to constantly analyze millions of parallel 24/7 digital waveforms. The amazon datacenters would be burning up terawatts of electricity to ignore the 99.99% of digital waveforms that is not the word "Alexa". So, are there any consumer devices out there surreptitiously uploading 691 megabytes of digital waveforms (or any data) every single day? Is it realistic that Amazon would engineer the product to work like this? I have a router that has a fallback option to a cellular connection in case my cable is disrupted. I and others would hate to get a surprise bill from Verizon/AT&T for going over my 2GB/month transfer limit if the amazon device was designed via scenario #2. EDIT TO ADD scenario #3: (#3) there are unpublicized/secret list of words in addition to the documented "Alexa" within the embedded chip's "vocabulary". Such words might be "vacation" and "book" and depending on the subsequent words sent to the cloud, you'd see ads for suntan lotion or Stephen King novels on your next visit to amazon.com. The chip's vocabulary may also include listening for transient sounds like dog barks or sneezes. You'd then get ads for dog food and cold medicine. In this scenario, a constant digital waveform is not uploaded 24/7 but extra trigger keywords unknown to the consumer causes more data to be sent than he/she agreed to.

Karunamon 12y ago
This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day. You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening. Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are: * This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to) * That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands) * That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely) * That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.) * That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream * That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above * That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media Fucking. Seriously? If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  You do realise that it doesn't need to be streaming 48kHz 24 bit audio back up don't you? It could be something really low, like GSM which is 13.2 kbit/s. AMR is even lower! So to stream audio at the threshold where it is still legible, it doesn't need masses and masses of data as you presume.

slouch 12y ago

"prove this doesn't happen"