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Amazon's Alexa is the target of a pair of lawsuits that allege the voice assistant violates laws in nine states by illegally storing recordings of children on devices such as the Echo or Echo Dot. It's the latest development in an ongoing debate around Alexa and privacy. The suits were filed in courts in Seattle and Los Angeles on Tuesday, on the eve of Amazon unveiling the latest generation of Echo Dot Kids Edition smart speaker.
Announcing the new version of the devices on Wednesday morning, the company attempted to defuse privacy concerns — saying it built its premium "FreeTime" games and media service for kids with the input of family groups. Amazon said it adheres to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The company added, "None of the Alexa skills included within FreeTime Unlimited have access to or collect personal information from children, and there are multiple ways to delete a child's profile or voice recordings."
However, the suits are about the Alexa assistant and Echo devices more broadly, not just the FreeTime service for kids. The suits name nine states — Florida, California, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington — that prohibit recording conversations without the consent of children or their parents.
"At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users that it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so," the lawsuits allege. The suits were filed in California and Washington state by lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and Keller Lenkner LLC.
Also at BGR, MarketWatch, and Seattle Times.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday June 14 2019, @06:29PM (2 children)
I take your points. They are good ones.
I posited three groups:
1. The dumb (they can't help that)
2. The willfully ignorant (they can help that and it really chaps my ass)
3. The folks who aren't ignorant, but just don't care (this can be for a variety of reasons)
I suspect that if we were to break down your varieties (variants?) of stupid, we'd end up in a similar place.
As such, I believe that the difference in our points of view are largely ones of nomenclature, not substance.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 14 2019, @10:54PM (1 child)
Every try living the surveillance free lifestyle?
Yea, maybe its stupid to have a smart speaker. What about voice input on your phone? Or modern apps for banking, uber, etc. Everything spies, down to your OS and soon your house and car. Then if you take care of yourself, all of the others around you will have this stuff and you'll get caught up in it. Many people have just given up or aren't knowledgeable enough to tweak all of their devices. Plus, it isn't being shouted from the rooftops, nor have they felt any overt pain from it just yet.
What they do feel is being left out and inconvenienced not using this malware. Having both seen this coming (as anyone remotely paying attention would) and actively fighting back, beating my technology into submission has taken up considerable amounts of time. Even browsing the web on VPN I constantly get blocked from sites and get captchas to where I don't use google anymore.
This is my realm and its a huge PITA while we're mocking people who only delve in at the most superficial level. Most people would turn off the spigot if they could but they lack the knowledge/fortitude and just give up.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday June 15 2019, @02:02AM
You are absolutely correct. It's *really* hard. But not bringing devices into your home that you *know* will be listening to everything you say is just beyond the pale, IMHO.
Just to clarify, I'm not mocking *anyone*. Merely stating what I understand to be true.
Perhaps I *should* add a fourth group to my list as just "ignorant" in addition to "willfully ignorant"
And I don't mean "ignorant" as a pejorative in this context. Rather I mean it in a literal way, as "not knowing."
This is, as you quite rightly point out, a difficult situation. I've had several previous discussions about this here, and the gist of what I've said (and I'm a technology professional with over 15 years of not just IT experience, but, specifically, InfoSec [wikipedia.org] experience) is that I mitigate my digital footprint as best I can without inconveniencing myself too much.
I don't use phone apps for, well, pretty much anything, except for phone calls and text messages -- encrypted (Signal preferred) and SMS (where the other side can't or won't use Signal), and I disable NFC, GPS, Google Location Services and Bluetooth. I'd love to disable my phone provider's ability to track my phone, but I'd like to be able to make and receive phone calls -- It is, after all, a *phone*.
I also disable Wifi when I'm not in a relatively secure location, . I block as much tracking as I can in browsers (with blockers, cookie blocking/management, filtering and "private browsing", disabling javascript, etc.) both on my general purpose computers as well as my mobile device. I certainly don't enable voice access and *definitely* don't have any in-home spying devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home. Nor do I perform *any* financial transactions with my phone.
My take on it is that as much as I do (which is a lot more than most), it's that it's not a very good solution. But it's better than nothing.
And while the corporate spying operations try to fly under the radar (as is extensively discussed in Shoshanna Zuboff's [wikipedia.org] fine book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [publicaffairsbooks.com]), they're still pretty high profile, IMHO.
In this case, I'm specifically talking about devices that record your voice (as that's the topic of the story), and anyone who is *remotely* paying attention should realize that those recordings are being stored, analyzed and used. What's more, since there has been *plenty* of mainstream press coverage about this over the past couple of years, it's not exactly a secret.
All that said, your point is well-taken. But aside from taking significant (as I do) or somewhat more significant (as you do) steps to *mitigate* our digital footprints, and explain to as many folks as we can the exposure that they face (most of my family just pooh-pooh's the issues -- ignoring the risks even though they know about them), what else can we do. It's not like we can function in society without significant difficulty, as you correctly pointed out.
I suppose we could access online resources only from public terminals (internet cafes, libraries, etc.) and use MAC address spoofing/randomization on Wifi networks (as is the default on IOS, Linux, Android and Windows) on our own devices, as well. However OS and browser fingerprinting is pretty ubiquitous these days, so the the utility of modifying MAC addresses is of limited utility.
Explaining the issues to folks is (at least in my experience) is also not so useful, as even when they understand what's going on, they often *choose* to purchase such devices and use all manner of "free" services that snarf up their PII anyway.
And that extends to the corporate world almost as much as the consumer world.
You may think I'm unduly harsh by calling people "willfully ignorant," and perhaps you're right.
There are people who just don't have the information they need (unintentionally ignorant?), and we should try to help get them that information.
There are those who aren't so bright (that's not an insult -- Half of everyone has an IQ below 100, and a significant fraction of those are under 80 -- I know a lot of people who aren't so bright, almost all of whom are kind, decent and good people, many of whom I call 'friend'). And we should help (and I try) those people to protect themselves.
I save my scorn for those who *should* know better, but choose not to learn, and those who *do* know better and ignore what they know.
What else can we do? As I said in the post to which you replied, "unless and until that vast majority of folks who are either willfully ignorant or don't care stop enabling them, these folks will continue to profit from this behavior. And as long as they can make a profit, they'll keep doing it. And double-down. Again, again and again."
To use a technical term, it's way fucked up.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr