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from the If-you-agreed-it's-not-spying dept.
A judge has ordered Amazon to hand over Echo records to assist with a murder investigation. When Christine Sullivan was found dead in her backyard after being stabbed multiple times, New Hampshire requested for data held by Amazon to be released to help solve the crime.
An Amazon spokesperson said earlier it would not release the recordings "without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us."
The judge agrees.
So he issued just such a legal demand.
[...] "Amazon does not seek to obstruct any lawful investigation but rather seeks to protect the privacy rights of its customers when the government is seeking their data from Amazon, especially when that data may include expressive content protected by the First Amendment," company lawyers wrote at the time.
It is yet to respond to the New Hampshire Court order.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:23PM (2 children)
Their terms and conditions do indeed say that Alexa is only cloud-active when lit up, after you've said the wake word or pressed the button.
However, don't think of what they DO do. Think of what they CAN do. Those terms and conditions can change at any point. Are you always reading them thoroughly before agreeing to them every time they change?
Also, if Amazon should decide to, there's nothing stopping them *OR AN INTERESTED THIRD PARTY* attacking the device, or replacing that firmware with something that just uploads everything, terms and conditions or not.
You have a mic. With an internet connection. The only thing stopping joining the two is a single bit somewhere that can be toggled.
Now think what happens if, say, a government issues a secret court order/warrant to require Amazon to do things on certain Amazon devices owned by certain people, and never speak of it. Game over. And they've tried to do that to Apple before now, so it wouldn't be the first attempted use of consumer devices in such cases.
Why anyone tolerates these things in their house, I can't imagine, let alone train their kids to "play" on them.
Smartphones are bad enough.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday November 15 2018, @11:04PM (1 child)
If you have an Internet connected computer, you have a mic with an Internet connection (speakers can be used as microphones too). Unless you have personally designed and fabricated all of your hardware, you are always at the mercy of dozens of manufacturers. It's just a question of which dozen you choose to trust. There isn't a particular reason why Amazon and its dozens of supply chain members are more or less trustworthy than, say, Dell and its dozens of supply chain members, or HP and its dozens of supply chain members.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @02:05AM
OMFG
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/154343/can-a-speaker-be-used-as-a-microphone [stackexchange.com]