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from the random-acts-of-predictable-randomness dept.
From a Business Insider Article
A couple in Portland, Oregon, say that speakers in their home powered by Amazon's Alexa smart voice assistant recorded a private conversation and sent the recording to a person in their contacts.
A woman named Danielle says she and her husband got a call two weeks ago from the contact, who told them to immediately unplug all their devices because he had heard their conversation in his home 176 miles away in Seattle, KIRO-TV first reported. She said he proved it by providing details about the conversation.
Amazon told the news station: "Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
[...] Here's what happened, according to Amazon:
"Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like 'Alexa.' Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a 'send message' request. At which point, Alexa said out loud 'To whom?' At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, '[contact name], right?' Alexa then interpreted background conversation as 'right'. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely."
If we're going to be unable to resist having devices in our private spaces which can record our private conversations, then Amazon needs to step up and seriously upgrade the security and privacy to the level we've come to expect from IoT devices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @10:12AM (3 children)
> We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
>
> [...] Here's what happened, according to Amazon:
None of these seem like "rare occurrences" to me. In fact, the device is probably working through a decision tree and is "listening" for each of the next steps in sequence.
How hard would it be to have one button called "confirm" or "OK" that has to be physically pressed before email was sent (orders placed, etc)? I suppose lazy people would reject this...
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:09AM (1 child)
Given the voracious need for data to train NN's, and the fabulously small storage requirements of compressed sound data .. I assume it is recording all sound at all times. For analysis later with new, developing techniques.
Also, keyword searchable databases of what you say in your home is valuable to your masters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:38AM
> For analysis later with new, developing techniques.
For analysis later with new, developing marketing techniques.
ftfy
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 27 2018, @03:35AM
The point of these devices is that you can do things without touching the device, for example asking for a cooking recipe while your hands are dirty preparing the ingredients.
Requiring a physical button press undermines the utility entirely.
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