Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, "Are you crazy?"
Yet that's essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it's hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley's next frontier.
Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.
So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.
You can listen to your own Alexa archive here. Let me know what you unearth.
For as much as we fret about snooping apps on our computers and phones, our homes are where the rubber really hits the road for privacy. It's easy to rationalize away concerns by thinking a single smart speaker or appliance couldn't know enough to matter. But across the increasingly connected home, there's a brazen data grab going on, and there are few regulations, watchdogs or common-sense practices to keep it in check.
Let's not repeat the mistakes of Facebook in our smart homes. Any personal data that's collected can and will be used against us. An obvious place to begin: Alexa, stop recording us."Eavesdropping" is a sensitive word for Amazon, which has battled lots of consumer confusion about when, how and even who is listening to us when we use an Alexa device. But much of this problem is of its own making.
Alexa keeps a record of what it hears every time an Echo speaker activates. It's supposed to only record with a "wake word" - "Alexa!" - but anyone with one of these devices knows they go rogue. I counted dozens of times when mine recorded without a legitimate prompt. (Amazon says it has improved the accuracy of "Alexa" as a wake word by 50 percent over the past year.)
What can you do to stop Alexa from recording? Amazon's answer is straight out of the Facebook playbook: "Customers have control," it says - but the product's design clearly isn't meeting our needs. You can manually delete past recordings if you know exactly where to look and remember to keep going back. You cannot actually stop Amazon from making these recordings, aside from muting the Echo's microphone (defeating its main purpose) or unplugging the darn thing.
Amazon says it keeps our recordings to improve products, not to sell them. (That's also a Facebook line.) But anytime personal data sticks around, it's at risk. Remember the family that had Alexa accidentally send a recording of a conversation to a random contact? We've also seen judges issue warrants for Alexa recordings.Alexa's voice archive made headlines most recently when Bloomberg discovered Amazon employees listen to recordings to train its artificial intelligence. Amazon acknowledged some of those employees also have access to location information for the devices that made the recordings.
Saving our voices is not just an Amazon phenomenon. Apple, which is much more privacy-minded in other aspects of the smart home, also keeps copies of conversations with Siri. Apple says voice data is assigned a "random identifier and is not linked to individuals" - but exactly how anonymous can a recording of your voice be? I don't understand why Apple doesn't give us the ability to say not to store our recordings.
Inspired by what I found in my Alexa voice archive, I wondered: What other activities in my smart home are tech companies recording?
I found enough personal data to make even the East German secret police blush.
When I'm up for a midnight snack, Google knows. My Nest thermostat, made by Google, reports back to its servers' data in 15-minute increments about not only the climate in my house, but also whether there's anyone moving around (as determined by a presence sensor used to trigger the heat). You can delete your account, but otherwise Nest saves it indefinitely.Then there are lights, which can reveal what time you go to bed and do almost anything else. My Philips Hue-connected lights track every time they're switched on and off - data the company keeps forever if you connect to its cloud service (which is required to operate them with Alexa or Assistant).
Every kind of appliance now is becoming a data-collection device. My Chamberlain MyQ garage opener lets the company keep - again, indefinitely - a record of every time my door opens or closes. My Sonos speakers, by default, track what albums, playlists or stations I've listened to, and when I press play, pause, skip or pump up the volume. At least they only hold on to my sonic history for six months.
And now the craziest part: After quizzing these companies about data practices, I learned most are sharing what's happening in my home with Amazon, too. Our data is the price of entry for devices that want to integrate with Alexa. Amazon's not only eavesdropping - it's tracking everything happening in your home.
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