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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

#191

Post by krallja »

evilduck wrote: post #159
Johnny555 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I could imagine trying to capture and analyze at least a few words leading up to the trigger word of 'Alexa' to help make it more accurate. Even if the trigger word is Alexa, different languages, dialects, and slang might vary quite a bit. Some significant portion of people might use "Yo, Alexa...", vs "Hey Alexa...", vs. "Alexa...". I'm sure someone with a spouse or child named "Alex", "Alexander", "Alexandra" and s…

You can also configure the wake word as "Echo" or "Amazon" if Alexa is too ambiguous.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#192

Post by marssaxman »

supergeek133 wrote: post #64
notlisted wrote: post #48

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…

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.

I don't care if it is or isn't listening; it can, listen, if its owners want it to, because they control the software it runs. I can't do anything to control that save refuse to own one, so that's what I'll continue to do.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#193

Post by sirtastic »

Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio profile is then matched to words which are then used for marketing. I wouldn't be surprised if Echo, Google Home, etc do something similar since sending the full audio recordings would be both bandwidth and storage heavy.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#194

Post by kobeya »

sirtastic wrote: post #193

Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio…

"Audio profile" meaning MFCC coefficients? That's still enough to fully reconstruct a meaningful audio stream. Obviously, since it's enough to do speech recognition.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#195

Post by [deleted] »

happynewyear wrote: post #104
ajross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a great question. Reminds me of Uber and its new policy of monitoring location of customers few minutes after drop off "to improve service". It is also true that if Alexa was listening in on conversations so as to have "social conversation context" for "improved processing of commands" ... well.

[deleted]

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#196

Post by discodave »

visarga wrote: post #167
eclipxe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There is no cost model that accounts for the device constantly streaming realtime audio data to Amazon. Just doesn't make sense.

But it could still record background audio and transmit it later to Amazon, when an Alexa query is triggered. How do we know that it doesn't do that? Has anyone opened up the data stream to check what audio it contains?

You can measure the amount of data it's sending so you can at least verify it's not uploading vastly more audio than expected.

They could do sneaky stuff like upload the audio after the wake word + a few seconds BEFORE the wake word. The cost benefit of this doesn't seem high especially if you consider that Amazon says all the time that they want to 'earn customer trust'.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#197

Post by calibration263 »

politician wrote: post #102
supergeek133 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evidenc…

PCs, cell phones, and cordless phones have all previously been tapped or hacked on behalf of law enforcement and other actors, so people generally know and understand what they're getting into there. These microphone devices are new. People, even HNers, mistakenly think that these devices are not listening until a magic word is uttered (full stop). Many people will not realize that the connection to the internet is b…

I think the previous posters point is that the risk incurred by an Amazon Echo is the exact same as any modern smartphone. That iPhones and Android devices have supported Ok Google and Hey Siri for a while now, are also already always listening, and already get OTA updates.

Your claim that "these microphone devices are new" seems to imply you're excluding almost every smart phone we already have in our pocket, with the exact same network attached hot mic concerns.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#198

Post by fucking_tragedy »

Johnny555 wrote: post #179
avar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, Alexa?"

Allowing that sort of sentence construct violates the privacy afforded by starting with the key phrase. If the Echo did allow this, I would not own one since it would send a lot more unintended sentence fragments to Amazon. 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…

It's strange that you'd have concerns about privacy when it comes to sentence structure and not that you have a literal black box with a powerful computer and an always on internet connected microphone in it.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#199

Post by calibration263 »

mnm1 wrote: post #68
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.

Actually, according to the third party doctrine, you have. The difference between this and a cellphone is that you voluntarily give up this information whereas a cellphone does not transmit such data voluntarily. There are surveillance laws and other problems if a phone is recording you unknowingly. With Alexa, the recordings are submitted voluntarily. I'd be shocked if the police don't get their hands on this data.…

How is any smart phone that supports OK Google and Hey Siri different from an Echo in this respect?

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#200

Post by fucking_tragedy »

sirtastic wrote: post #193

Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio…

What difference does it matter if you can still construct words and thus the content of your speech?
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