Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#91

Post by mysterydip »

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 would think it would be possible and even beneficial to dedupe the data (15m homes x NFL broadcast, for example). Link a list of each echo's text conversion given similar data but perhaps different background noise. Or maybe getting data from multiple echos in different homes at the same time allows for "noise" filtering (people asking different things while the same background noise is present).

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#92

Post by mcphage »

ajross wrote: post #77
gordyf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for speculation: you can open the Alexa app and play back your own queries, audio and all. There's even a help section titled, "How do I delete Alexa voice recordings", which reads: "You can delete specific voice recordings associated with your account by going to History in Settings in the Alexa App, drilling down for a specific entry, and then tapping the delete button. Or, you can delete all voice recordin…

Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.

> What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation?

I would be very surprised if Amazon sends everything up to the cloud; it would be very expensive to do so. Looking for "Alexa" in the audio is done locally, and probably triggers recording then.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#93

Post by lozf »

darkstar999 wrote: post #34
cryptarch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

96kbps is pretty high for voice. You could get away with 48 or less.

Way less with modern speech codecs. Even Opus at 32kbps would be overkill for the required quality.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#94

Post by ajross »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #90
gordyf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

Or if you have a conversation about coffee[1] including the word Alexa[2], but that cannot be parsed or validated as a "query" and produces no response from the device, does that audio get stored somewhere? Could it be captured in transit by other actors? Seems like an important distinction to me.

[1] Or, y'know, about some subject more subpoenable or privacy-sensitive.

[2] Or, y'know, not including the word Alexa but triggering the on-device recognition anyway. "Alex, uh, here's your payment for murder."

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#95

Post by notheguyouthink »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #90
gordyf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

According to others in the thread (i know nothing of this), it sounds like that is easily verifiable though, and not done. Ie, it sounds like they've monitored the outbound traffic of the device and it only sends Alexa... requests.

It's possible that they keep a rolling buffer of all audio in the device though. There could be legitimate reason to hold onto such a window of audio. Would make for an interesting discovery.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#96

Post by supergeek133 »

politician wrote: post #79
supergeek133 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, people will still tinfoil hat that the thing is listening and uploading everything they say. I had this exact same conversation with a number of people when the news came out about the Echo being in the Wynn Hotel in Vegas.

Given Stuxnet, your position seems dangerously naive. There is really only one question: can this device be remotely modified to passively monitor a specific device in a way that is relatively undetectable to the end user? If the answer is no, then fine. If the answer is yes, then what guarantee do you have that the ratchet of tyranny will not eventually deploy those capabilities? "I'm not hiding anything" is a poor…

People have discovered how to at least gain access locally. https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4inesj/rooting_the_...

Am I saying people shouldn't be skeptical? No. But I'm saying people are focusing on a subset of devices when they've had cordless phones, cell phones, and PCs in their homes for decades.

I just get tired of the constant fear-mongering, if we have evidence of a problem, call out Amazon and have them fix it.

The cops in this story are banking mostly on the fact that it was accidentally triggered and they have some kind of audio, that's legit. Yet this article was written as if Amazon might magically expose some recording capability.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#97

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #94
chipperyman573 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

Or if you have a conversation about coffee[1] including the word Alexa[2], but that cannot be parsed or validated as a "query" and produces no response from the device, does that audio get stored somewhere? Could it be captured in transit by other actors? Seems like an important distinction to me. [1] Or, y'know, about some subject more subpoenable or privacy-sensitive. [2] Or, y'know, not including the word Alexa bu…

[deleted]

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#98

Post by supergeek133 »

jdiez17 wrote: post #82
supergeek133 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making quite a few assumptions. 1) The device is storing any amount of locally recorded audio. So far evidence says no. 2) Amazon would OTA all echos to upload everything it hears. So far evidence says this hasn't happened. It also likely won't because IMO security people monitor these devices more than anything else on the planet. Some I believe for good reasons, the others just want to play gotcha. 3) If 1 a…

(I think) the argument your parent is making is that Amazon could easily send a software update to a specific Echo to make it record everything it hears.

If at the request of the government, yeah that's a problem unless there is some kind of warrant, right?

I'm all for people being suspicious, but the intent of this was to say "the cops are hoping it might catch something" as in it was accidentally triggered.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#99

Post by vaishaksuresh »

politician wrote: post #86
rz2k wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the police be able to enter any house with locks they can pick? I suppose that would educate people, too. edit: I misread the comment as, " without a warrant"! Ugh

I don't understand your rebuttal. Are you disputing that LE does not have the ability to request a wire tap from a judge with a warrant? Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window? Are you suggesting that a network-attached microphone is not equivalent to an open window? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine )

>Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window?

Different things. In a closed room, there is expectation of privacy. It is not the same for what can be seen from an open window. Also, there is no assurance that LE won't misuse this to crush any dissent or silence somebody they don't like. It is easy to take something said at home out of context or doctor it to sound like something else.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#100

Post by wtetzner »

notlisted wrote: post #87
pavel_lishin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking this by saying "Alexa, " and seeing at what point it starts doing something does not prove that it's not listening all the time, doesn't prove that it doesn't keep recording, and in general only tells you about Alexa's UX, not the underlying technology.

It stops listening. No action required. You can check in the Alexa app what is recorded (I just did). You can also check what is sent out to Amazon (which is what I did when I got the first one, using wireshark). The hardware is listening all the time, for the wake word. Nothing is sent until a wakeword is received.

But you don't know what audio data the local device itself is storing as an implementation detail.
Post reply on HN