Deutsch
English
There are times when I feel especially proud, e.g. when technical knowledge and a healthy dose of skepticism dominate the blog comments. I'm not a fan of "I told you so", but this week was one of those moments! Amazon admitted to eavesdropping on and having staff members transcribe conversations from all over the world, through Alexa. Many of you had predicted this beforehand! Bloomberg were able to question seven Amazon employees, and what they had to report was more than interesting. Not only are vocal utterances from Alexa users computer-processed but they're also overheard by 7,000 Amazon employees.
Last week, Amazon had their hands full appeasing outraged users of "smart" (i.e. interactive) devices, such as Alexa or Echo. The news had broken that user recordings were not only stored by the system itself, to improve voice recognition (or so they say), but also processed by human workers. According to Bloomberg, a staff of 7,000 employees from Costa Rica all the way up to Romania each review up to 1,000 clips a day, a daily total of 7 million cases of eavesdropping and 2.5 billion privacy intrusions per year. Or maybe it's "just" 1 billion, depending on the assiduousness of the workers. Interestingly, Amazon themselves report an "extremely small number of interactions". So they don't listen in every time but in a fair number of cases. Very reassuring.
Amazon goes on to aver the data are handled anonymously and with the utmost discretion. Employees reportedly have no direct access to information, like user name or account credentials. Strangely enough, though, Bloomberg has screenshots showing both user account ids, first names and serial numbers of connected devices. I don't know about you but my definition of "anonymous" definitely differs from Amazon's. Just last December, Amazon strongly declared the recordings were only accessible to a small intimate circle, now, that circle has grown to fill an entire soccer stadium. The reason for this breach of trust, as far as we know, is that Alexa isn't as smart as the ads and Amazon would have us believe. Conversations are hand-typed and then reentered into the system. Humans just aren't machines and our vocal utterances still regularly elude voice-based assistants, even after years of development. So other humans have to fill in the gap.
Multiple devices, one principle: We talk to them
As with most companies, not every recording is handled strictly professionally. Bloomberg reported the case of one female shower singer whose hilarious out of tune singing became a local phenomenon. Particularly entertaining, bizarre or incomprehensible recordings are seemingly prone to being shared through chat conversations between workers. Two of them, Bloomberg says, had also encountered cases of sexual assault, they were, however, advised against notifying the authorities. Since when is it okay to ignore these crimes? At least, they were allowed to share the clips with other colleagues - to ease their conscience. Sounds like a full-blown scandal to me. By the way: It would appear the faint of heart should steer clear of any such job offerings.
If you've already begun disposing of your Amazon-enabled devices, know that Amazon apparently only record conversations that include the code word "Alexa". This part of Amazon's ample promises seems to be intact, even though there are "malfunctions". After all, there exist a number of words that sound a lot like "Alexa", and Alexa is also a quite common first name. How unfortunate, or fortunate depending on your motives. Interestingly, recordings aren't deleted automatically. This allows Amazon to create comprehensive profiles to better tailor their devices and services to the voices and preferences of their users. Users weren't informed of this practice, though. "We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems" is the delightfully neutral wording in Amazon's terms of use. At least, users can object and have existing recordings deleted. But what percentage of users are even aware of this option or would go to the app to leverage it? We thought our input would be computer-processed, only.
Can the system at least distinguish between critical and non-critical information? Not reliably. Time and time again, staff members reportedly heard sensitive data, like name and bank account information. In these cases, workers were instructed to forget what they had heard and mark the recordings as "critical". It makes one inevitably think, whether Amazon are the only company to act in this way. Naturally, inquiries to this effect were made to Google and Apple, but they declined to comment. Not exactly indicative of a clean conscience. Amazon's response, if consequential, was unconventional: Prices for Alexa and Echo were cut.
That's already enough for this article but I'd like to include a bonus treat. At the request of a German political party whether German intelligence agencies operate in a similar fashion, our government simply responded this information is to be kept secret because our agencies would lose this ability otherwise. Caught in the act, anyone? Our former Interior Secretary was less muddy: "With Alexa, users introduce a major eavesdropping operation into their homes." Users ought to be fully aware they're trading in their privacy for comfort. There can be no better closing statement.
What I would like to know: Do you use voice assistants for convenience or do you prefer to maintain a shred of privacy?
Happy Easter holidays everyone! Make sure to spent a few nice days with your friends and family. We'll be taking a short break but we're looking forward to hearing from you in the coming blog articles!
Seriously? Some comm enters have to make this about President Donald John Trump? They must have their head in the sand to not recognize the weaponizing of spying on normal citizens by the President's predecessor. As to the article, government is becoming a dangerous threat to our freedoms as citizens of this country.
This is to be expected.
I have no video or microphone devices on my PCs to ensure my privacy. I don't use Cortana or any other assistant. I use DuckDuckGo in place of Google and avoid doing any searching from within Microsoft Off ice as this is all routed via Bing.
My smart TV does have speech recognition - but the microphone is built into the remote and a button has to be pressed to activate it. As for my mobile phone, it sits in a sleeve when not in use and does not stay by me when I am relaxing. Further, the data channel on my mobile phone is routed via a VPN as is the Internet connection on my main PC.
I cannot guarantee that my privacy is fully protected, I do have Gmail and Live email accounts. But at least I can make life more difficult for those who would eavesdrop me.
Thank you for your timely article, confirming what we all really knew (but maybe chose to ignore) about any form of online communication. Perhaps the eavesdroppers would prefer that we forget we are online whenever Alexa and other 'friendly assistants' are in our homes or pockets.
As a die-hard WinXP user I believe my PCs are less equipped for this listening-in activity than later OSs (am I correct?) and I have never used their mic input sockets for anything.
As for more recent devices, be they Windows or Apple or Android, I always delve into the settings to disable any Cortana, Siri, Alexa or other un-named 'ears' I can find and also, just for the heck of it, white-tape (or even blu-tak!) over any unused cameras.
I also like the idea of using a mobile broadband hub to avoid the always-on landline broadband that knows my home address and phone number.
I must admit however that I hadn't thought of asking my visitors to turn off their own phones. Am I right in thinking that a phone on standby can be activated remotely, and thereby put into listening mode, but a switched off or completely powered down phone cannot be hijacked in this way?
TimH,
maybe not too paranoid after all...
@Keith Ward,
If you know people who say, "I dont care, I dont do anything illegal, I have nothing to hide", arrange for a stranger to them, but a friend of yours, to go to their house unannounced with a microphone and recorder and start recording at random periods during an evening. Your friends might them have a different attitude when they can see someone listening in and recording them.
Years ago there was a saying in the US that if you use email. everything you write should be treated as if it was being on a skywritten sign towed by an airplane over your city. This fits with the information told or asked of Alexa and similar services. There simply is, in an internet world, no real privacy anywhere anymore.
We have an ALEXA enabled Fire TV. It's always unplugged unless we are actually watching TV. We will not be buying any ECHO's or like devices. P.S. Turn off your cell phone and put it in another room if your still worried about eves droppers.
P.S.S. Love your blog!
Smart Tv's have always done this if you have voice activation turned on.
I used Alexa for fun more than anything but the entertainment value quickly wore off. I always assumed Amazon was probably listening in, but once confirmed I chose to disconnect it. People say "I dont care, I dont do anything illegal, I have nothing to hide." but words can be twisted and used against you, especially in todays US world of Trump. Alexa will remain disconnected in this home. Better safe than sorry.
Shock! Horror! Amazon listens in! OMG!
Companies should not be storing ANY user voice samples. Any sample could contain something confidential.
I have no voice recognition software turned on on my devices. In fact, my audio interface (for my microphone) is off most of the time.
So, the Amazon speaker thing reacts to 'Alexa', but for how long does it listen for? How does it know when a conversation is not a request for Alexa to do something? And, as you mentioned, is is a normal name.
I suppose any voice recognition will need people to confirm that the system's interpretation is accurate, they would need to listen and read a transcript of the system's output to verify it.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm? :) Seriously, I can't imagine such a system working without regular human intervention, but I had hoped for a smaller team and a higher degree of discretion.
Surely nobody is surprised by this.
Just as you shouldn't post anything on the internet that you wouldn't be prepared to see published on the front page of a national newspaper.
This is another marvelous article Sven and probably the most informative. I appreciate being warned.
I do not have a device of the Amazon Alexa, Google Home type although of course I do have yhe Google Home app and Google assistant on my phone. Not quite the same but close.
Call me paranoid but I have never used a voice-assistant and have disabled it on every device I have had since before Alexa was born. I had to root my first Android phone in 2006 to stop the Google app from eavesdropping. I worry about Face Time recording my video calls, but still use it only because my daughter lives 1500 miles from me and I can only see her and my grandkids in person once a year. It's not the companies like Google and Amazon I worry about so much as government being able to access the recordings without my knowledge or consent. I still worry about uncontrollable eavesdropping by other people's nearby devices while I'm in public or when I have visitors at home. I fear Big Brother, though it is happening 35 years later than Orwell predicted.
We criticise the Chinese government for extensive facial recognition and person tracking plus alleged data gathering by Huawei (and I am against all that) but then we enlightened (or maybe lazy) Westerners let it all happen to ourselves voluntarily.