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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

#211

Post by cma »

ben174 wrote: post #158
ajross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.

The 'Alexa' voice recognition is done on the client, not on the server. Once the trigger word has been spoken, the audio data begins streaming to the server.

They carefully worded it so that while it is true it only starts transmitting when there is a query, it doesn't stop transmitting afterwards. It could continue recording and sending to the server for the rest of the day, not just the query (just kidding.. I hope).

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#212

Post by frik »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #72
frik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> computational costs alone of doing NLP The speech recognition part could run on a Pentium 133 in the nineties (Nuance software, Dragon naturally speaking), the Echo device has probably a more powerful CPU than that. The NLP part could run on the device as well, it's mainly a storage problem, you need dozens of GB, at least 32GB sdcard. Ideally only the search phrases would be sent to Google/Amazon/etc. That's also…

Speech recognition in the 90s was absolutely turd.

Speech recognition worked fine in the late 90s. You could optionally train it for 15min with your own voive to improve the results. The Nuance software was better back then than what shipped with Win Vista inbuilt by default in 2006 and later. The same Nuance software runs nowadays on servers to power Siri, Google Now, Cortana. And who in the right mind would think every user gets its on dedicated super-computer. In reality, cloud based speech recognition and NLP has the advantage of a central database to collect different voice samples (to train) and a multi Gigabyte central NLP database, etc. But you won't get more CPU cycles than what would be available on a modern smartphone or a Smart TV or (what would fit in) an Echo like device. An offline-available software assistant as kind of premium feature for people who care.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#214

Post by visarga »

discodave wrote: post #196
visarga wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it could still record background audio and transmit it later to Amazon, when an Alexa query is triggered. How do we know that it doesn't do that? Has anyone opened up the data stream to check what audio it contains?

You can measure the amount of data it's sending so you can at least verify it's not uploading vastly more audio than expected. They could do sneaky stuff like upload the audio after the wake word + a few seconds BEFORE the wake word. The cost benefit of this doesn't seem high especially if you consider that Amazon says all the time that they want to 'earn customer trust'.

Maybe they have hundreds of secret wake words triggering recording and covert upload of audio. It's not hard to implement - they already have 3 wake words, and ability to record audio locally. A list of national security words and marketing words would be the first choices that pop into my mind.

Do you trust them not to waste this opportunity to get more user info? What about future software updates and especially user targeted software updates? They could avoid detection by only doing surveillance on selected targets. When they are caught, they can justify it with some "improving services" or "software bug" bullshit excuse.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#215

Post by Marazan »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #188
Fuzzwah wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having the data locally necessary to process the wake word is slightly more practical to havig the language corpus necessary to process all English language in hundreds of accents.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#216

Post by alexwebb2 »

calibration263 wrote: post #199
mnm1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, according to the third party doctrine, you have. The difference between this and a cellphone is that you voluntarily give up this information whereas a cellphone does not transmit such data voluntarily. There are surveillance laws and other problems if a phone is recording you unknowingly. With Alexa, the recordings are submitted voluntarily. I'd be shocked if the police don't get their hands on this data.…

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.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#217

Post by bisby »

scottmf wrote: post #183
bisby wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Depending on the brand of phone and the software you have installed on it. And for the phone to keep listening when you explicitly disable that feature would be an issue. Whereas pulling the plug on the echo is the only way to disable listening.

Siri isn't the main selling point of buying an iphone. cellular communications (data, sms, or voice) are. Whereas Alexa is 100% the reason to buy an echo. You can't really make the claim you didn't know the echo was listening (since it was the reason you got it), but a person could reasonably make the claim they bought a phone without realizing it was more than just a phone.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#218

Post by jonnytran »

hbt wrote: post #146

The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. It cannot be updated remotely by firmware. Crack open the device, test the analog component and confirm the signal only fires when you speak alexa and nothing else. Having said all that, I wouldn't buy it. NSA is known to temper with devices behind the back of companies (no matter how trustworthy you think Amazon/Google/Apple are). Check what they did…

> The part that listens for the "Alexa" word is analog not digital. > It cannot be updated remotely by firmware.

I used to think that about my phone, that it was hard-wired to "OK, Google". I had a Moto X (first generation), which is one of the first phones to have this always-listening feature. They claimed that it had special hardware that allowed it to work using very little power.

But after a software update, they added a feature that allowed me to retrain the activation phrase to whatever I wanted. They recommend using something with 5 syllables or more. It works. I haven't addressed my phone with "OK, Google" for years.

If Motorola (owned by Google at the time) can do it with Moto X, I'm sure Amazon could do it with Alexa too.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#219

Post by supergeek133 »

rhizome wrote: post #162
supergeek133 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If at the request of the government, yeah that's a problem unless there is some kind of warrant, right? I'm all for people being suspicious, but the intent of this was to say "the cops are hoping it might catch something" as in it was accidentally triggered.

If at the request of the government, yeah that's a problem unless there is some kind of warrant, right? Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Yes and that's a problem with law not catching up with technology. Unfortunately for many people in the country, other social/financial issues are more important to them.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#220

Post by calibration263 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #202
calibration263 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is that no one is concerned about the always on hot mic in their pockets, but it's the only thing people talk about with the Echo. Why aren't people claiming that everything you say is recorded on your iPhone or android phone? Or that it's all sent to apple/google? Yet they feel justified in claiming that of the Echo?

> Why aren't people claiming that everything you say is recorded on your iPhone or android phone? Or that it's all sent to apple/google? uh... there's tons of people complaining about that all the time. I don't know about you, but that's a constant criticism of both companies that I see.

I've seen it, but not every time there's a discussion about Android or iOS. Maybe it's just because the always on mic is the sole feature of the Echo, while it's just a feature for phones. That said I feel like a lot of people do criticize the Echo while not realizing the phone in their pocket is capable of the same thing. Especially people saying they wouldn't buy an Echo or put one in their house because of privacy concerns, while they surely have an iOS or Android device on their person.
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