Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#71

Post by supergeek133 »

reaperducer wrote: post #67
supergeek133 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my voice controls for 3 big reasons daily: 1) Timers (laundry, cooking, etc) 2) Music 3) Smart home stuff On the 3rd one, voice actually made the smart home easier. To use a smart light bulb you had to unlock your phone, open an app, login, and do your thing. Now I tell my Alexa/Google to do it and it's super easy. Also the chromecast integration on Google Home is killer "OK google play pandora on TV" or "Play…

I only use my voice controls once a day. When I come home, Siri automatically turns on my lights. When I go to bed, I shout "Hey, Siri, turn off the lights." (10% of the time she responds with, "OK, your six a-m alarm is off." I don't know why.)

Honestly it took me awhile to get to this state (aside from the fact I work with this stuff as my job). It was almost like the transition of getting a smart watch. Once I forced myself to do certain things with it, you get into a state where you realize how much easier it is to use it.

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#72

Post by DougWebb »

School-Cotton wrote: post #68
spiorf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud, and saves it for undisclosed amount of time, and has the ability to link those recordings to your account and the motivation to exploit it for business purposes? Not to mention possible data breaches in case that data is not perfectly secured.

> Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud What evidence do you have of this?

That's a necessary component of how it works: these devices don't do the speech recognition locally. They upload it to their cloud and run it through their machine learning network.

They're not supposed to upload "everything" you say, only the stuff you say after the wake phrase. The issue is that they're known to wake up and start recording when they're not supposed to, because they're not perfect about recognizing the wake phrase. There's also the fact that they have to be _listening_ all of the time in order to hear the wake phrase, and the security fear is that, due to a bug or malicious software, they could end up recording and uploading everything they hear as well. That's not a problem of the stated intent of the device, it's a problem of the latent capabilities being used improperly. The best way to secure the device is to remove those capabilities.

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#73

Post by School-Cotton »

DougWebb wrote: post #72
School-Cotton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud What evidence do you have of this?

That's a necessary component of how it works: these devices don't do the speech recognition locally. They upload it to their cloud and run it through their machine learning network. They're not supposed to upload "everything" you say, only the stuff you say after the wake phrase. The issue is that they're known to wake up and start recording when they're not supposed to, because they're not perfect about recognizing…

Yes, everything you said is true, but none of it contradicts my point.

"You could hypothetically be giving up all your privacy if there are bugs, and in some cases there are known bugs causing you to give up a limited amount of privacy" is a very different level of threat from "you are giving up all your privacy to Amazon who will use it for ad targeting".

I'm willing to accept the former, in return for the amount of convenience I get from the device.

However, others in this thread are arguing that nobody should accept the latter, which is irrelevant because it's not the real situation.

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#75

Post by JadeNB »

astrea wrote: post #69
gvand wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring, in a convolute way, to the fact that all the data collected have been/will be used to train the models that will allow offline voice recognition (like the one google has shown at i/o last week).

I might be mistaken, but the reason we don't see offline recognition (amongst other things) is hardware limitations, not the lack of training data. The small onboard chip doesn't have that much compute power, so they offload to more powerful Amazon/Google servers that can run the inference.

> amongst other things

I think that this is an important point. Obviously there's more computing power available in Apple/Google/whoever's data centres than on my device, and I'm sure that is, or at least was, a concern; but I also don't believe that they are indifferent to the utility of sitting on such a huge volume of user-submitted, real-world data.

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#77

Post by whatshisface »

uzero wrote: post #4

Why people are acting surprised about this? To me it has been always more than obvious that whatever you say to any of the internet connected “assistants” will be stored and kept as long as the assistant owning company likes.

There's a difference between "it's obvious that they're doing it" (which is only true for people above a certain paranoia line) and "here, look at this proof that they're doing it." There are plenty of things that are obvious to me based on my idea of people's motivations and past behavior, but if I talk to someone lower down on the paranoia spectrum they don't believe me - unless I can point to evidence that they're actually doing it. (A fair thing to ask for, after all.)

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#78

Post by phkahler »

oulipo wrote: post #70

This is why we are building 100% offline and private-by-design Voice AI at https://snips.ai , it is free for makers and works in english, french, german, japanese, spanish, italian, and more coming!

Thank you for that. Voice recognition makes for awesome devices, but we dont need every gadget connected to the net sending our words elsewhere. Keep up the good work!

Re: Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

#79

Post by SilasX »

jplayer01 wrote: post #76
snowwolf wrote: post #34

In the EU this is a violation of GDPR if true.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Is it not a GDPR violation?

Agreed, I was about to say the same thing. If it's their data (i.e. data the customer generated and stored on the service), and there's a way to validate that it's theirs (as it exists in the data store) based on information the customer provided, I'm pretty sure the GDPR requires deletion on request.
Post reply on HN