Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

Post by malux85 » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

mtsr wrote: post #11

jrockway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mention Google in the first sentence. I think it's important to not overly freak out about these home assistants. Your phone company or video conferencing company is already listening to your confidential client calls. Your email provider is reading your email. Your internal applications run on Amazon's servers. Your upstairs neighbor has their ear to the floor. I think lawyers are used to thinking "as long as i…

It wasn’t always the case that teleconferencing providers could listen in. At least Skype was peer-to-peer originally. And only corporate firewalls and some bad providers would prevent it from working today. My email provider surely isn’t reading my mail, but then again, I seem to be in a minority that doesn’t use gmail. The threat of real-time speech-to-text is real, but police all over the world have made the mista…

Post by masklinn » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #17

zie wrote: post #7

I have no doubt they are able to hear anything happening in the room they happen to be installed in. But I doubt they listen for anything but their keyword, and I seriously doubt they listen, record and send off to their overlords what they hear on a massive basis. However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted bas…

>However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted basis listen, record and send conversations on, that would be very possible, and very harmful for whoever was targeted. Besides the fact that they have better antennas, this is true for pretty much any device with a microphone and a processor with audio processing cap…

Post by zitterbewegung » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

Post by misnome » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #22

zie wrote: post #7

I have no doubt they are able to hear anything happening in the room they happen to be installed in. But I doubt they listen for anything but their keyword, and I seriously doubt they listen, record and send off to their overlords what they hear on a massive basis. However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted bas…

Where is the keyword 'Alexa' recognized? On the device or back in Amazon towers? If the latter then every sounds is transmitted back to grep for 'Alexa'. Of course we believe they don't store that other noise data.

Post by AlexandrB » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #14

I want and expected it to listen to everything. Sure it can be used to harm me but it won't be a good business decision, on the other hand they can use the data improve the product and service for me.