Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
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Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
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Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#2Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish.
There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data.
Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#3I'm curious if the police will push this, as it could reveal how much voice information is actually stored. Amazon has declined to answer how much voice information is stored online[1] and how much if that is tied to your identity. We do know that Alexa stores a list of queries you've spoken, and you can "delete" these records, but it is unknown if this impacts the actual voice data behind them.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/11...
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#4Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
> It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard
Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data.
We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know.
Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#5Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Unless the guy said "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" or "Alexa, play 'The Sound of Silence'" just after the time of death, I think you are right.
I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#6Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data.
[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#7From the privacy perspective, IMO, once you put a device in your home that you know is always listening, and is forwarding an unknown amount of audio from your home to a third party, at that point, you have surrendered your right to privacy.
Edit: not just my opinion, it's a matter of law. (thanks @mnm1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#8From the privacy perspective, IMO, once you put a device in your home that you know is always listening, and is forwarding an unknown amount of audio from your home to a third party, at that point, you have surrendered your right to privacy. Edit: not just my opinion, it's a matter of law. (thanks @mnm1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
No, you haven't, any more than when you buy a cell phone with a camera and microphone built in. People still have rights regardless of the products they buy.
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#9Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Https://ubrp.arizona.edu/study-finds-no-difference-in-the-amount-men-and-women-talk/
Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive.
Edited with better source/numbers.
Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
#10Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Speech can be encoded with less than 10Kbps [1], which means a maximum of 108MB of data per day. I don't think that's an impossible amount of data. [1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
You could even convert it to text before sending.