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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

#41

Post by FrancoDiaz »

sharemywin wrote: post #38
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?

but, are they storing every voice recording? How would you know?

So we know that they have a record of every query that Alexa has detected. I'm guessing what you're questioning is whether they're storing the actual voices so that they can differentiate between different people that have queried Alexa.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#42

Post by literallycancer »

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?

When will people finally understand that laws are above EULAs or ToS and other toilet paper?

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#43

Post by Flammy »

wccrawford wrote: post #36
Flammy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ale…

If it stored everything (and not just requests after the watch word) then it would end up trying to store audio or transcriptions of so many hours of tv and random conversations that it would be ridiculous. And that's just my house. I imagine most people have one somewhere near a TV, and it would do the same.

I'll point out Facebook is using this always on recording for advertising purposes and one of those is to fuel a nielsen-like TV/movie/audio popularity business.

Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same:

> Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony

https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#44

Post by FrancoDiaz »

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…

I deleted my other reply to you. I understand the difference now. It's about the actual voice vs the query text.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#46

Post by netsharc »

guscost wrote: post #32

This brings up an interesting question. If I say "Alexa, call the police!" or "Alexa, I need an ambulance!" will anything happen? It doesn't officially say it can be used to request emergency response and I'm scared to try it. I wonder if they've received a lot of these requests and/or if they have an emergency team on standby.

I don't think anything will happen, although people can write their own "plugins". It's already a speaker/microphone, why not make it a speakerphone; if you slipped and broke something and can't even crawl to the phone, saying "Alexa, call an ambulance!" and being able to communicate with the rescuers would be helpful. Sadly it's not in their spec to be used as that, yay for closed hardware!

Alternatively, Amazon should have a log of music you asked it to play. The suspect is named Bates. If you were being chased by him, could you yell "Alexa, play music by The Police!" followed with "Alexa, play the soundtrack of Bates Motel!"? You'd be dead but at least there'll be a hint for the police somewhere in the cloud.

"Alexa, play James Blunt!"

"Alexa, play Bates Motel!"

"Alexa, play The Killing Hand by Dream Theater!"

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#47

Post by PavlovsCat »

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #17
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

Yep, I'm amazed at myself on how much privacy I've given up for convenience from 10 years ago. As long as you know the trade-offs... I've started smart-devicing my home and a little wary about that, not from a privacy perspective, but from a hacking perspective. I can almost imagine a sci-fi/horror movie there somewhere.

I think the trade-offs are mostly in the future. Right now we just jumped out of the plane. Give it a few decades of free fall.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#48

Post by notlisted »

Alexa listens only to the words after the wake word. What's more it doesn't capture more than 10-12s past the wake word. If you have a device you can check this yourself (Alexa, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…).

It's actually hard to get it to capture this much. Take a breath or pause to long and capture stops sooner.

The request of the police is nutty and indicative of not understanding the technology. Unless the murdered woman yelled out "Alexa {pause a little bit for wakeword recognition} Heeelp, my husband is killing me, call the police" or the husband asked "Alexa, how do I clean a bloody hottub", nothing material will be discovered.

I have 4 of them. After the first one I checked what was captured, what was stored, what was streamed. Nothing that mattered.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#49

Post by mcbits »

d136o wrote: post #45

We were playing with one this xmas and of course someone shouted "Alexa, how do I get rid of a body?" Its answer was to call the police. We all laughed but it made a few of us nervous. Brave new world we live in!

The answer was "call the police," or it actually called the police as an answer? I assume you meant the first, but I'm not quite 100% on that.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#50

Post by Fnoord »

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…

I guess a way around this is:

1) Put the speech to text. 2) Put the text to speech. 3) Send the data over Tor.

Although #3 would use a Tor exit node and would allow packet sniffing/logging/mangling etc, it'd at least be more anonymous.

Thing is, this is in nobody's interest. Not in the police or Amazon's interest. For the owner, it'd depend on if they are the defendant/suspect or the victim. The victim is not always the person who owns the Amazon Echo. But an Amazon Echo is a nice point of defense because the proof cannot be deleted anymore. All one has to say during a robbery is "Alexa, call the cops". That's quicker than having to dial the number. And at any point, if you do say Alexa, you can also trigger a warning or proof. Ultimately, if you could change the keyword to something more generic you could trigger it without a robber noticing, or by tricking them. A keyword like "put your hands up"? I don't know.

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