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Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

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Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#11

Post by hprotagonist »

The Echo was able to pick a voice out of a crowd engaged in conversation. That means it is capable of singling out individual voice. That means it has been identifying individual voices, tagging the as “Unidentified voice 1″, Unidentified voice 2” and so on. It has already associated the voices of its owners, and if they have set up profiles for other family members, for them as well, so it knows who goes with those voices.

this is overstating the case. if you don’t believe me, have two people speak at an Echo simultaneously.

multi-speaker babble is still a major challenge in speech recognition, and speaker identification is equally hard and unsolved.

i still won’t buy one, but it’s important to be reasonable.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#12

Post by johnjac »

spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does-amaz...

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#13

Post by majewsky »

spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

Strong encryption is a thing.

EDIT: Another thing that just came to my mind. Even when you analyze network traffic and observe that traffic only occurs during your queries (i.e. in the seconds after the hotword is uttered), that doesn't mean that the Echo won't use the opportunity to send some previously-recorded audio to the server together with the current recording. In the same way that clever hackers disguise themselves by having their network traffic mimic the shape and direction of legitimate network traffic.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#14

Post by beckler »

spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

I'm sure you could use Wireshark and see what requests are being made, however, they very likely use TLS so getting the content of those requests would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible.

However, if you don't mind potentially destroying your echo, I'm sure you could reverse engineer a way to see what's going on.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#16

Post by johnjac »

spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

http://www.vnutz.com/articles/Idle_Network_Activity_of_an_Am...

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#17

Post by detaro »

beckler wrote: post #14
spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

I'm sure you could use Wireshark and see what requests are being made, however, they very likely use TLS so getting the content of those requests would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible. However, if you don't mind potentially destroying your echo, I'm sure you could reverse engineer a way to see what's going on.

As far as I know, only this year's Echo models don't have a known way to root them, so you could likely circumvent the encryption on an older model to inspect traffic. I'm not aware of any publicized results of someone doing that though, and it doesn't necessarily tell you what the backend can and can't extract from the audio data.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#18

Post by johnjac »

majewsky wrote: post #13
spobin wrote: post #6

Surely it's possible to sniff what's being sent back to Amazon's servers? If Amazon are lying and they are storing/analysing everything the Echo hears, surely this would be easy to prove?

Strong encryption is a thing. EDIT: Another thing that just came to my mind. Even when you analyze network traffic and observe that traffic only occurs during your queries (i.e. in the seconds after the hotword is uttered), that doesn't mean that the Echo won't use the opportunity to send some previously-recorded audio to the server together with the current recording. In the same way that clever hackers disguise the…

Yes but we could could look at the amount of of data transmitted in total. Audio compression is well understood, and can infer within an range of usable quality, if any excess voice or other data is sent over the network.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#19

Post by lucozade »

hprotagonist wrote: post #11

The Echo was able to pick a voice out of a crowd engaged in conversation. That means it is capable of singling out individual voice. That means it has been identifying individual voices, tagging the as “Unidentified voice 1″, Unidentified voice 2” and so on. It has already associated the voices of its owners, and if they have set up profiles for other family members, for them as well, so it knows who goes with those…

It's not just over-stating it, it's demonstrably wrong. All you need to disprove it is to ask someone else's Echo to answer a question.

What I presume it's actually doing is responding to the keyword, Alexa in this case, and somehow correlating the rest of the question to the voice that said the keyword. I don't happen to know what criteria it uses to do that but it's clearly doing that or something a lot like it.

That's much less dystopian than voiceprinting the family.

Re: Why You Should Never Buy an Amazon Echo or Even Get Near One

#20

Post by gruez »

>As most readers probably know, both the microphone and the camera can be turned on even when the phone has been turned off. He uses headphones to make calls. This makes the recent phone design trend away from headphone jacks look particularly nefarious.

What's preventing you from doing the same with USB 3.1 or lightning headphones?

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