131–140 of 229 posts
You log into http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards and you see all sorts of queries Alexa/Echo heard from you but didn't understand complete with the audio snippet.
If Amazon gave them the account details they just need to log-in to hear them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 discov…
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothetically, if I was tasked with recording everything, I'd just add an internal buffer and then ship chunks of that data along with the regular queries.
Indeed, yes, that'd be the way to do it. You could claim the post-wake-word data is recorded at a higher bit rate than it actually is, thereby accounting for the larger than necessary data-transfer. I won't be surprised if we find out this is happening. They'll probably call it a "bug", fix it in an OTA, but then accidentally regress 6 months later.
I'd be very surprised if this is happening -- Amazon knows people are watching, and it would erode trust with customers if it's found out that they are spying.
I'd be much more concerned about whether or not my phone is spying on me, even if it says it's only listening if I say "Ok Google" or "Siri". It's much harder for me to see what traffic my phone is sending across the cellular network than to snoop Amazon Echo's wifi traffic. And phone malware (sometimes baked in by the manufacturer) is increasingly common. Since the Echo does not allow user-installed Apps, at least it's less vulnerable to malware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> computational costs alone of doing NLP The speech recognition part could run on a Pentium 133 in the nineties (Nuance software, Dragon naturally speaking), the Echo device has probably a more powerful CPU than that. The NLP part could run on the device as well, it's mainly a storage problem, you need dozens of GB, at least 32GB sdcard. Ideally only the search phrases would be sent to Google/Amazon/etc. That's also…
Speech recognition in the 90s was absolutely turd.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
I think the media have made it clear to the public that there's no expectation of privacy around these devices, and that there would be a hard case to make in court that someone was so insulated from the media that they wouldn't have any knowledge of what those products could be enabled to do with full, legal collaboration between law enforcement and the manufacturer.