Amazon refuses to comply with police request for Amazon Echo recordings in murder case.
Makes me feel better about the suite of Dots I got for the holiday! It also shows just how little the courts and police understand about some of our always-on/listening technology. This was a blatant fishing expedition that… unless the murdered would have literally said, "Alexa, what's the most efficient way to murder someone?" there's nothing that Alexa has that would be useful to them. Sure it's always listening… but it's doing so passively. It doesn't jump to action until it hears it's keyphrase signaling it to jump into action about your query.
The whole using data from the smart water meter is pretty chilling…..
I still don't see why they need to keep any recordings at all for these devices. You can respond to voice commands just fine without keeping the original speech anywhere. At least, anywhere beyond a few minutes. Process and discard.
Of course I can understand having lots of speech files on hand is useful for software training, but that shouldn't be standard/default.
As for requests for information, always seemed pretty simple to me – court order or nothing. I can appreciate in some situations the lesser evil is handing data over, but it should never be a defacto standard part of a investigation.
+Thomas Wrobel Just like Google – I assume they use the recorded samples in order to further improve accuracy of the natural language processing and speech to text capabilities. When an improvement is made to either system – you really need a huge chunk of readily available data to run through it to ensure it a) is not less accurate than it was and b) has some measurable improvement.
"Of course I can understand having lots of speech files on hand is useful for software training, but that shouldn't be standard/default."
+Thomas Wrobel The number of people who would actually opt-in to this in these "oh my god think of my privacy" days – would be stupidly small – and as the biggest use of speech samples is for dealing with accents – we would just be sat in 20 years time with systems that still couldn't cope with anyone that wasn't speaking in "ideal" English.
Alexa doesn't keep anything until you hit her key word. So while it's always listening, it's not doing anything with it (by which I mean communicating with Amazon) until you wake it up. You do voice training 25 times (per device I think… I've only set up two of the three I got for xmas so far) from multiple places in each room and per user. After that… until you say, "Alexa <insert query>" she's not sending anything.
This just proves how naive our police and judicial systems are on technology. Unless the murderer said, "Alexa… how to I murder this person?" there's nothing there. To my knowledge, Alexa will not call 911 either 😉
I don't know the feature set of alexa, but it seems possible if there was, say,a request for directions, that might be relevant for a case. I mean, it would still be a fairly stupid thing for criminal to do, but then, many are fairly stupid.
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+Andrew Jones-McGuire Then Id suggest people making these things might have to offer cash or some other financial intensive for helping to develop software.
Because having everyones every request logged somewhere potentially forever IS a privacy issue. This isnt like people getting worked up over say, context based advertising.Theres much more scope for a abuse here.
This is a post snowden world, you cant trust that data is safe forever no mater how much you trust Amazon/Google/Apple themselves.
+Thomas Wrobel true, but just like Google – you can log in to your account and click "delete" to erase all your saved voice recordings
Just because you can delete your info doesn't mean Google delete's all of it. From their page, "When you delete items from My Activity, they are permanently deleted from your Google Account. However, Google may keep service-related information about your account, like which Google products you used and when, to prevent spam and abuse and to improve our services." – https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/465?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
Amazon states it will delete it if you do so… but doesn't make mention of if THEY completely remove your recordings or retain them for some period of time. – https://smile.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602040&sa-no-redirect=1