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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

#201

Post by calibration263 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #165
illumin8 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. You're seriously willing to carry smartphones, which have both microphones and cameras, and give no indication visible or otherwise, of when they are listening or recording or sending data, and run whatever dodgy code some asian devi…

> No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. I don't disagree. If there was a legitimate alternative, I would use that, but there isn't. I do everything I can to make sure it runs as much FOSS as it can. > Reality called - it wants the tinfoil hat back. How can you claim that…

His point is that no one is concerned about the always on hot mic in their pockets, but it's the only thing people talk about with the Echo. Why aren't people claiming that everything you say is recorded on your iPhone or android phone? Or that it's all sent to apple/google? Yet they feel justified in claiming that of the Echo?

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#202

Post by CaptSpify »

calibration263 wrote: post #201
CaptSpify wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it means that you're sitting in your house without a roof, and saying "I would never forget to close my windows during a rainstorm." Never mind the rain is pouring through your roof. I don't disagree. If there was a legitimate alternative, I would use that, but there isn't. I do everything I can to make sure it runs as much FOSS as it can. > Reality called - it wants the tinfoil hat back. How can you claim that…

His point is that no one is concerned about the always on hot mic in their pockets, but it's the only thing people talk about with the Echo. Why aren't people claiming that everything you say is recorded on your iPhone or android phone? Or that it's all sent to apple/google? Yet they feel justified in claiming that of the Echo?

> Why aren't people claiming that everything you say is recorded on your iPhone or android phone? Or that it's all sent to apple/google?

uh... there's tons of people complaining about that all the time. I don't know about you, but that's a constant criticism of both companies that I see.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#203

Post by chillacy »

DougWebb wrote: post #189
gordyf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I s…

Typical audio compression rates can be 10:1, especially for voice. So if the LED rings are lit for 30 seconds, is there 30 seconds of network activity, or 3 seconds? If it's 30 seconds, either Amazon is grossly wasting internet bandwidth by streaming uncompressed audio, or it is sending 10x as much data as the query it is supposed to be sending. You do understand that it is trivial to operate the LED lights and micro…

And I'd like to add that even if Amazon doesn't do this, malware could, or certain state actors may compel Amazon to ship this on certain customer's devices.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#204

Post by sib »

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?

Yes, they are storing it. Source: Amazon web site and Alexa app (which let you review / listen do / delete said audio). They are very up-front about this.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#205

Post by jonnytran »

DougWebb wrote: post #189
gordyf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I s…

Typical audio compression rates can be 10:1, especially for voice. So if the LED rings are lit for 30 seconds, is there 30 seconds of network activity, or 3 seconds? If it's 30 seconds, either Amazon is grossly wasting internet bandwidth by streaming uncompressed audio, or it is sending 10x as much data as the query it is supposed to be sending. You do understand that it is trivial to operate the LED lights and micro…

I'm completely with you. Recording video from webcams without turning on the light indicator has been exploited for years. [1] The FBI director admitted to putting tape over his webcam. Why would anyone think audio is any different?

1: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/12/18/software-allows-hackers-...

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#206

Post by sib »

dingaling wrote: post #130
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…

> Alexa listens only to the words after the wake word. It only records after hearing the wake-word. It listens all the time. > After the first one I checked what was captured, what was stored, what was streamed. How did you MitM the SSL?

Alexa is the service in the cloud - Alexa doesn't get the words that are spoken before the device (the Echo / Dot) detects the wake word.*

This sounds like a small distinction, but it is critical to a clear discussion of what's going on.

If you review the interaction history in the Alexa app or on Amazon's web site, you won't see those utterances that did not result in detection of the wake word, because that audio was not streamed to the cloud.

* Technically, there is a very short buffer of audio that is captured on a rolling basis in order to detect and stream the front of the wake word sound.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#207

Post by sib »

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.…

Except that the device (service) is not streaming / transmitting your audio except when you indicate to it - in exactly the same way as you would with "Hey Siri" or "Ok Google" - that you intend it to do so. (Or if it makes a mistake and falsely detects the wake word; again, something that your mobile phone is also capable of doing.)

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#208

Post by sib »

netsharc wrote: post #37
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

But laptops, and smartphones have come with cameras and integrated microphones for a long time, the only difference to the Echo is that they don't claim to be always listening.

Mobile phones (well, at least iPhones and Android phones) are "always listening" for their wake words in exactly the same way that the Echo is "always listening." They are doing local signal processing to detect a wake word (phrase) and, upon detection, they stream audio to cloud-based service that performs ASR and NLP on it in order to perform some service on behalf of the user.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#209

Post by ryanlol »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #198
Johnny555 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it really easy to run your own code on it? Not really a black box. Except well, literally.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#210

Post by Johnny555 »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #198
Johnny555 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you talking about my phone, my car, or my TV?

I trust Amazon more than Samsung, Chevy or, well, Samsung. But at least I can verify that my Echo is not sending home unusual amounts of data when it's not in use.

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