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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

#181

Post by smokeyj »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #148
politician wrote: post #69

The device doesn't start listening when you say the wake word, the device is always listening . It's only the UX that responds when the presence of the wake word is detected. This means that the device is continuously monitoring the environment for the presence of the wake word we know about ("Alexa"). Can the device monitor for other words that trigger other UX sequences? Of course it can! Can Amazon deliver an OTA…

> In fact, I would be in favor of law enforcement having the ability to "tap" these network-attached microphone appliances with a warrant. Then, perhaps, people will begin to understand what they've really bought. All your arguments apply equally to any smart phone. It's another network attached microphone. Are you in favor of it there too?

Why not? Seems like a subpoenad record would serve as an effective canary for determining what end user data is actually stored. Taken to the next step, LEA should be able to ask google alone for your browsing history for the last 10 years based on Google Analytics. Storing customer data should be seen as a corporate liability if you're not upfront about what is stored, used and how.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#182

Post by CaptSpify »

crack-the-code wrote: post #180
CaptSpify wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that won't give you the whole story. They could batch up the network traffic to send later, or push an update that changes how much they listen after your traffic monitoring is done.

>They could batch up the network traffic to send later, I was thinking that too, but realistically, someone would eventually discover this (consider how much outbound traffic would have to go at once in order to store that much audio). >push an update that changes how much they listen after your traffic monitoring is done. Again, someone would eventually discover this. It wouldn't be hard to constantly monitor networ…

I can't say I agree. How long did it take for us to figure out that certain camera's were sending photos back to china? or that other apps do things that seem malicious. Many people watch those kinds of stats, but the vast majority of them don't.

Additionally, just because they have it always recorind for one person, doesn't mean they have the same software running for everyone else.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#183

Post by scottmf »

bisby wrote: post #125
netsharc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

which means if a smartphone records you, you can play the "why was it listening?" card with an echo, you can't claim "why was it listening!?" because you knew it was and that was the reason you bought it. granted, I dont think Amazon is doing anything nefarious at this point (other than what they normally do, building an advertising repertoire about you). Also, most people seem to agree that it only transmits data to…

But our phones are always listening for "Hey Siri" or "OK Google".

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#184

Post by scottmf »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #113

>Police say Bates had several other smart home devices, including a water meter. That piece of tech shows that 140 gallons of water were used between 1AM and 3AM the night Collins was found dead in Bates' hot tub. Investigators allege the water was used to wash away evidence of what happened off of the patio. When every house is IoT connected, we will be very close to a 'post-crime' world.

Or a world where hackers frame innocent people for murder by modifying their water usage stats.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#185

Post by CaptSpify »

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.

Wow, so they set up the software to guarantee every user is running the same software? and that can't ever get updated? that's pretty amazing.

/sarcasm

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#186

Post by bogomipz »

The article states:

>"A ring on the top of the device turns blue to give a visual indication that audio is being recorded. Those clips, or "utterances" as the company calls them, are stored in the cloud until a customer deletes them either individually or all at once."

Is there a technical reason for storing this after NLP processing has been completed on the "utterance."? Wouldn't an ephemeral cache be sufficient?

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#187

Post by hueving »

bkbridge wrote: post #2

Alexa only waits for the wake word "Alexa." It would cost more money than God in hardware to store every thing Alexa ever heard. She saves you're requests. And shows you those request in the Alexa App. And you can also delete it if you wish. There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data. Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?

Don't confuse what you are allowed to see in the app with what Alexa captured and sent to Amazon. There is no reason to think they are equivalent.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#188

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #109
Marazan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that software in that era ha to be painstakibgly trained for each individual voice. Echo "just works", and is clearly doing it by punting to the cloud.

Only the wake word needs to be processed locally.

Which the iPhone has no problem with. “Hey Siri” works even when you have no Internet connection.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#189

Post by DougWebb »

gordyf wrote: post #105
chipperyman573 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

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 microphone independently, right? The hardware /could/ be designed so that the microphone can't be activated without also turning on the LEDs, but I'm guessing they're independently controlled by a microcontroller, and that it's the hidden software which is responsible for turning the LEDs on when the microphone is in use.

Yes, this is a concern for smartphones as well. The capability, even if it is not currently in use, is a concern.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#190

Post by CamperBob2 »

tclancy wrote: post #33
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…

I really like the math here, but isn't this a bit pointless? The system wants to parse meaning from audio; storing just the text it parsed is a lot smaller. Store just the text and whatever machine learning score of how probable the text is correctly parsed and that sounds like something prosecutors would love to bring into court: "Please read this line and let's see what score you get . . . "

It could also store compressed voice waveforms in such a way that any reproduction from the compressed data would sound horrible but would be at least somewhat intelligible to human listeners.

1200 bits per second is almost enough for toll-quality speech -- and I'm referring to the state of the art a few years ago. Speech codecs are probably better now. But let's stick with 1200 bps. That's enough to store continuous speech in the vicinity of the device for a year, using only about 5 GB.

My guess is that if you cared only about intelligibility and not fidelity, you could do the job with 10%-20% of that space.

So yes: Alexa could easily be collecting and storing a vast amount of data that isn't immediately transmitted or used.

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