The one thing about these stories that keep coming out about the home assistants... they kind of create the impression that this is an issue specific to home speakers, and you can avoid it, by simply not buying them. That's misleading. Any voice command you use to operate any internet connected tech gadget, from phones to smart TV's, is potentially stored and flagged for human review. You really have to avoid using v…
And not to be anywhere near anyone else's listening devices. Isn't there a law in some US states that there needs to be consent before recording someone? How does this fit in and who would be held responsible, the owner of the listening device or the company behind it?
I'm kind of surprised that Massachusetts's very strong laws about wiretapping permit storage of training data from Amazon Echo/Google Assistant/Apple Siri/Microsoft Cortana/Xbox, given that by their nature they naturally sometimes record incidental conversations of people who didn't intentionally trigger them.
It's a fairly mainstream view that MA wiretapping law requires written consent from every participant in a conversation for the recording of their conversation in a non-public place and does not permit implicit agreement (there isn't any kind of common-sense carveout for "you should have known you were being recorded in the background by the Echo at your neighbor's house"). See MGL chapter 272 section 99 (https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/cha... , sample writeup https://www.masslive.com/news/2014/06/massachusetts_wiretap_... )
Now, MA has a bunch of laws on the books that no one actually enforces. There is a law against jaywalking which provides a $1 fine and tickets are never issued. Or for a bigger example, there is a law that requires you get a temporary permit from the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission before importing any quantity of alcohol into the state, including for example buying beer at a NH liquor store or flying home from Europe with a bottle of wine. Last time I looked I think that law provides for a $2500 fine or 6 month jail time if violated, although it was hard to tell. ABCC will absolutely insist that this is a real requirement if you ask, and will even provide a copy of all such permits they have issued for the year under freedom-of-information rules -- I once asked and was given a copy of 46 permits issued in 2015, many to a single person who reviews wine and stubbornly files a permit for every shipment he orders from out of state apparently to protest the requirement, causing so much administrative overhead that the ABCC tried to issue him a special blanket approval to get him to go away, which he refused to accept.
To the extent that wiretapping laws are similarly not really enforced against the technology companies who make, retain, and distribute the recordings, this seems like an unknowably large regulatory risk a lot of companies are taking. Sure, the state loves its big local employers (IIRC Alexa development is in Cambridge?), and wouldn't want to lose their tax revenue, but what if the political winds change?