171–180 of 229 posts
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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
They already can, with a warrant. The lock need not be picked, they'll just bust down the door.
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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…
What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?
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That's exactly what Amazon would like there users to think. How do you think he wake work is detected? It MUST be listening to some sort of ambient audio, wether that is recorded or kept in anyway, only Amazon would know.
Amazon doesn't use telepathy. You can inspect the network traffic on your router and the contents of its local storage.
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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.
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?
Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".
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?
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...
People only speak a few hours per day and "interesting" conversations could be sampled from time to time and some Alexa stations flagged for full upload, if they want to know.
The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. Crack open the device, test the analog component and confirm the signal only fires when you speak alexa and nothing else. Having said all that, I wouldn't buy it. NSA is known to temper with devices behind the back of companies (no matter how trustworthy you think Amazon/Google/Apple are). Check what they did…
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you know because they let you access and replay the recordings from their app.
But we don't know that's every recording that they have. They very well could have a "allow_user_to_see_recording" toggle.
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What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?
"What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, Alexa?"
By saying "Alexa" first, it gives me a chance to hear the wake-up tone before I continue my sentence.
So if I'm saying to my friend Alex "Alex uuh, tomorrow we will rob the bank", I have a chance to stop before incriminating myself. But if I say "Tomorrow we'll rob the bank Alex uh... are you in?" and the Echo interprets that as a command, then it's too late, it's already been sent and analyzed.
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Amazon doesn't use telepathy. You can inspect the network traffic on your router and the contents of its local storage.
But that won't give you the whole story. They could batch up the network traffic to send later, or push an update that changes how much they listen after your traffic monitoring is done.
I was thinking that too, but realistically, someone would eventually discover this (consider how much outbound traffic would have to go at once in order to store that much audio).
>push an update that changes how much they listen after your traffic monitoring is done.
Again, someone would eventually discover this. It wouldn't be hard to constantly monitor network traffic for noticeable discrepancies in outbound activity.
Furthermore, a discovery like this would not go overlooked by the general public. Amazon would be doing a serious disservice to their reputation by going about extracting the audio in such a mischievous manner.