Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

Post by MiddleEndian » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

9NRtKyP4 wrote: post #25

MiddleEndian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although this non-existent "research" has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;

Post by tclancy » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

cryptarch wrote: post #13

bkbridge wrote: post #2

Alexa 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 about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m…

Post by Flammy » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

tastythrowaway2 wrote: post #20

alexwebb2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have the rights they have agreed to. What does the EULA state? Privacy policy?

Post by netsharc » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #7

From 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

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

Flammy wrote: post #28

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute, we'd already know if Alexa was recording everything by the network traffic that obviously has already been sniffed. We can assume that Amazon is storing every "Alex,..." query that you've ever done. So what is there to know?

We know they are streaming it to do all the NLP in the cloud. This is obvious from the computational costs alone of doing NLP. The important question here is "What happens to the audio data streamed to the cloud, a few seconds AFTER the query has been identified (or not identified) and the results sent back to the Alexa device?" The nieve assumption is "all audio data is deleted after processing". The reality is that…