Smart Speakers and Privacy: Explained
Privacy Concerns with Smart Speakers
Eavesdropping is a sensitive concern. Would you let strangers eavesdrop at your home and store the recordings? No, right? Yet, that is what smart assistants like Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa are doing to millions of us who use smart assistants to run innocuous errands. From streaming music to reading out weather reports for the day, these devices do it all. Surprisingly, with the advent of artificial intelligence, this is an emerging market and these devices have a mighty impact on our lives.
When it comes to technologies artificial intelligence is not as smart as you think. An immense amount of manual labor goes in computing the data and training AI. That also means that there is perhaps someone listening to all the voice recordings that these smart devices record while we speak to them.
Amazon acknowledged that it employs people to listen to a “small number of interactions from a random set of customers”. As scary as it sounds, the company says that it does so in the sole interest of the smart device owners. However, the truth lies in the fact that these huge amounts of data are being interpreted into information that could be further used against you. Not only so, these conversations could also be extrapolated to make predictions about you with an accuracy rate of almost 90%.
Although Amazon faces growing concerns from its customers over storing large amounts of personal data, not many are aware of how these data could be extremely exploitative. They strategically utilize your search results on the site to obtain a detailed report about your preferences. Based on which, it manipulates users into buying products they otherwise would have opted out of. Besides, it could also sell this information to third party entities like political parties and retailers to target and appeal to you.
Amazon has always asserted that Alexa can only send recordings back to the serversif it hears it’s wake word. However, what they do not tell us is that they have been tapping into our microphones all along. These smart speakers record within the range of the devices even when the user is not interacting with the personal assistant. Amazon employees review these verbal commands to improve speech nuances and natural language understanding systems. Occasionally, this private information could be critical data like bank details, personal details, etc.
Courts and investigators are likely to use these smart devices as data-gathering devices which could ultimately lead to the formation of De Facto surveillance state to fight crimes. They believe that these devices might contain shreds of evidence that are related to the crime. With relevant search warrants and court orders, companies like Amazon have little choice but to turn it over which raises serious privacy concerns.
Recently, Amazon presented the Echo-look add-on that features an in-built selfie camera that can be controlled by your voice. It uses the machine-learning algorithms with advice from fashion specialists to guide you regarding your current look and suggest ways to make it better. To top it off, the fashion-savvy assistant also tries to sell you clothing and accessories from Amazon’s apparel lines. It is these such minor interventions that make me wonder about the ethical courtesies of the bot world.
People are not aware that their sloppy conversations could pose potential threats. Its intervention is not just limited to our homes, it is increasingly able to get into our minds and we cannot be certain that these observations will not be used against us.
The real concern is, even if Amazon pledges to protect our privacy, how much do we trust them? These data could be easily hacked by threat actors and used for malicious activities. Even though Amazon claims that users can opt-out of having the voice recordings used by Amazon, a better solution to this is not to collect data at all. Instead, they could send users voluntary surveys to observe ways in which people interact with Alexa.This is just a mere glimpse of the future and it already looks apprehensive. For generations, we have been trusting these machines just to do something, but our next generations will grow up in an age surrounded by automated envoys who would decide for them what to do and when. Therefore, it is for us to decide if we would want to share a home with a device whose privacy implications and ethical intentions are questionable.
Related Articles
General Data Protection Regulation - Explained
In 2012, the European Union (EU) lawmakers decided to modernize the data protection and privacy rules present across the 28 EU state blocks. The proposal was drafted to boost individual rights and give consumers greater control over their data in ...Next-Generation Firewalls - Explained
Next-generation firewall (NGFW) At a very basic level, a firewall can be defined as a network security system, either an equipment, a software, or both, that controls the traffic flow between a trusted network (say an enterprise LAN) and an insecure ...What we've Learnt from GDPR
GDPR’s stringent regulations have ensured businesses can no longer be ignorant about how they obtain, process and store data. Now businesses need to have a legitimate reason to collect and use data. They also need to delete the data once its intended ...Cybersecurity Trends to Lookout for in 2021
Current trends in Cybersecurity: Blockchain, biometrics, GDPR and more In this digital age, all our online activities leave trails. In spite of privacy-related incidents that have affected businesses and individuals alike, very little has gone into ...Passwords are Dead
The demise of passwords Passwords have been all over the news for all the wrong reasons for sometime now. They are being compromised more easily every day. The death of passwords seems inevitable right now. Bill Gates foresaw its demise back in 2004. ...