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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: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 27 2018, @03:49AM
Look, there are lots of good reasons to avoid IoT devices, but when you keep hyping bad reasons, it undermines your own cause because to opponents it looks like you don't have any good reasons, forcing you to use bad reasons.
In this instance, the only "problem" is that Amazon's Echo device has poor command recognition, where it recognized background noise as a command. No privacy violations, no ethically questionable design, no security issues (other than someone inside your house being able to access your private contacts list, but presumably they can rifle through your drawers at that point too). You have got to build your platform on strong cases, not weak ones.
So let's talk about something interesting. Understanding that someone is talking to you is hard. Even humans get it wrong all the time: https://xkcd.com/476/ [xkcd.com] The fact that a device got it wrong is unsurprising, and it doesn't seem like this issue is common or the mass media would be blowing up instead of parroting this single incident.
Using conversation as a human-computer interface is a really cool idea, but of course there are issues. This particular issue, though rare, could be serious if we start hooking up more powerful systems to conversational interfaces. Google's newly hyped Duplex technology might be a good stepping stone for adding stronger contextual understanding to conversation UIs (e.g., if your conversation partner is talking over you like background chatter, they're probably not engaging in conversation with you). Humans have a lot of coping mechanisms and redundancy built in (like repeating yourself), so now we need to teach computers to do that too.
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