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

221–229 of 229 posts

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#221

Post by mnm1 »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #216
calibration263 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not. I think the poster may be confused about how the Echo works - it's not constantly streaming audio or transcripts back to Amazon, just when it's directed to do so via the "Alexa" trigger word. You are absolutely not consenting to send full transcripts of your conversations to Amazon. If they are in possession of it, it's entirely illegal, and the third party doctrine doesn't apply.

Whether the device constantly streams data or sends it every once in awhile is irrelevant. In the agreement with Amazon you agree to give them them the data, including the voice data. Amazon even lets you manage/delete the data after the fact. They're not collecting it illegally. Whether it is full voice transcripts or not that you're agreeing to send to Amazon is not 100% clear, but that's also irrelevant because by using Alexa you've agreed to send that data. It really depends on Amazon's definition of "when you interact with Alexa." I'm pretty sure that's quite broad.

This isn't Apple fighting encryption backdoors. This is Amazon impeding justice.

"1.3 Voice Services. You control Alexa with your voice. Alexa streams audio to the cloud when you interact with Alexa. Alexa processes and retains your voice input and other information, such as your music playlists and your Alexa to-do and shopping lists, in the cloud to respond to your requests and improve our services."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#222

Post by slededit »

illumin8 wrote: post #145
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something you should probably understand about Amazon is that their Leadership Principles are real, and customer obsession is their main focus. A big part of customer obsession is not eroding the trust of customers by treating their privacy as extremely important. For example, I've never heard of an incident in the more than two decades that Amazon.com has been in business of them selling customer data to a 3rd party…

If trust really is so important, then why are fraudulent and counterfeit goods so rampant on their store?

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#223

Post by slededit »

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…

The request is not nutty, perhaps the victim was aware enough to ask "Alexa, Call the Police!". FWIW This could be a great replacement to those fallen and I can't get up buttons for the elderly.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#224

Post by ionised »

eclipxe wrote: post #154
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not happening. Period. Amazon takes customer trust very very very very seriously.

Facebook, Microsoft and Google say the same thing, doesn't make it true.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#225

Post by ionised »

watty wrote: post #178
CaptSpify wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't know that's every recording that they have. They very well could have a "allow_user_to_see_recording" toggle.

No, from day one people have been sniffing Echo traffic to see if it sends any non-triggered data. It does not.

I'm thinking more along the lines of;

"Hey we allow you to delete past recordings associated with your account and as far as you are concerned they will be, but we're gonna keep a copy for ourselves right over here, that you'll never know about."

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#226

Post by throwaway7767 »

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.

Opus is quite usable for speech data down to 8kbit/s, even 6kbit/s is mostly understandable. At 10-12kbit/s you have good quality voice recordings.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#227

Post by tripzilch »

zeta0134 wrote: post #116
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…

I think there's a stronger mental disconnect here in a lot of consumers. Detecting the wake word is easy to do locally; doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally. Because the wake word is able to be processed offline, there is no need for the Echo device to record and transmit audio all the…

> doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally.

This is an unquestioned assumption actually.

I think it's way more to do with the NLP system being very very proprietary.

I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done locally, computing is pretty powerful, but they never bothered to even try and make it work locally. Because "cloud computing" is a dream come true for businesses, hiding their special sauce, not having to explain what they're doing (whether it's hard or not) and always maintain control.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#228

Post by guscost »

JamieF1 wrote: post #66
smileysteve wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be of interest for the elderly, "help, I can't get up" with an omnidirectional microphone instead of a fragile, not waterproof, awkward beeper that you carry everywhere

I'm going to look in to this and develop a skill that allows someone to ask for help. Unless it has already been done,will check it out.

Awesome idea. Even if it is just "text my emergency contact" that could be really helpful in a pinch.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#229

Post by chrishacken »

icebraining wrote: post #128
chrishacken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe they don't understand the technology, but why not just hand it over so they can determine for themselves that there's no data pertaining to the investigation. They're essentially obstructing justice. They're trying to act like the good guy, but they're really just being assholes. Of course there's the possibility that they have something to hide and are actually collecting more data than we all think they…

How are they obstructing justice by simply asking for a warrant? Should they simply divulge private recordings to any random cops that ask for it? Is that how you wish companies treat your data?

They were given a warrant. Did you not read the article?

>Bentonville issued a warrant for Amazon to hand over any audio or records from an Echo belonging to James Andrew Bates.

Post reply on HN