Devices sprout ears: What do Alexa and Siri mean for privacy?
Between your laptop, smartphone, smart TV, and perhaps a聽virtual assistant, how many microphones are in your home?
The number of households with a hands-free assistant is growing by millions each year, but their convenience may come at a price. With law enforcement already using smart-device collected data as evidence, digital privacy rights are becoming more important 鈥撀燼nd less understood 鈥撀爐han ever, as the rapid pace of technological advancement and shifting attitudes towards privacy keep the topic murky.
The home assistant Echo was Amazon鈥檚 last holiday season, with Forrester Research suggesting in 2016 alone. The Echo family of devices are all variations on the theme of a smart speaker that can listen to, understand, and respond to voice commands for聽, to spelling, to shopping. Like Siri鈥檚 implementation in recent iOS devices, a large part of the convenience is how the device is always listening, so you don鈥檛 have to put down what you鈥檙e doing and find your phone to get an answer.
But some worry there鈥檚 a fine line between always listening, and always recording. ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley warns that 鈥渆ven the most remote threat of surveillance鈥� can cast 鈥溌�... over otherwise freewheeling private conversations".
We all act differently when we think we鈥檙e in private. The question is, are we truly alone when we鈥檙e with our devices?
In the case of Siri, the answer seems to be yes, mostly. There鈥檚 no user-accessible record of your previous queries because Apple associates them with a random ID number, rather than your email address or iCloud account. After six months, both are deleted.
For the Echo, however, it鈥檚 more complicated. 鈥淭he cost of the device is not the ultimate revenue for these companies 鈥撀燼dvertising and personal information are what's at the end of the rainbow for them,鈥� explains Albert Gidari, the director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, in an email to the 海角大神 Science Monitor.
As part of its quest to make ever more accurate recommendations and improve its voice recognition technology, Amazon maintains a database of your conversations with the Echo, which you can . In addition, when it enters and leaves your home, to minimize the risk of interception by hackers.
Why ship the data off at all? Because the Echo and the iPhone are more ear than brain, and all the heavy-duty data crunching required for machines to understand human speech is done on far-away Amazon and Apple servers. The good news is, the ears themselves aren鈥檛 that smart. Beyond the wake commands of 鈥淎lexa鈥� or 鈥淗ey Siri,鈥� very little data is stored locally and the devices record no conversation unless they hear the wake phrase first.
Still, machine hearing is at an early phase of development, and mistakes open the door to eavesdropping. Mr. Stanley laid out a potential scenario for confusion:
鈥淚t's easy to see how a sentence such as 鈥淗e was driving a Lexus in a way she said was dangerous鈥� could be heard by an Echo as 鈥淎lexa: Sin away she said鈥攚as dangerous.鈥� The constant potential for recording means that users do not necessarily have complete control over what audio gets transmitted to the cloud.鈥�
Mr. Gidari, however, is cautiously optimistic. 鈥淸T]hey designed [the Echo] well, but we are at version 1.0, so as the product evolves and Amazon and others develop, paying attention to privacy in that evolution will be important.鈥�
The concern is more than just theoretical. Police in Bentonville, Ark. have already submitted a search warrant for 鈥� and other text records鈥� from the Echo of 2015 murder suspect James Andrew Bates. Currently, the amount of data the police were able to extract from the Echo is unclear, and Amazon refused to turn over data from its servers beyond basic account information. Center for Democracy and Technology policy counsel Joseph Jerome commended Amazon for 鈥� to the fullest extent possible鈥�, but warns that this case should be a wake-up call.
As Mr. Stanley described it, there are two opposing legal forces at work. On the defensive side, the Fourth Amendment establishes the 鈥渟anctity of the home,鈥� which prevents law enforcement from an unjustified search of a house. On the offensive side, however, stands the 鈥渢hird-party doctrine,鈥� which permits police to access information voluntarily shared with a third party such as your bank or phone company, even without a warrant.
With the purchase of an Echo, a user has voluntarily invited Amazon, a third party, into their home, creating a contradiction. To Stanley, the solution is clear: 鈥淭he third-party doctrine must go.鈥� Mr. Jerome agrees that the current state of the law is 鈥渞ipe for reform.鈥�
Even with the third-party doctrine, however, data collection isn鈥檛 exactly a free-for-all. Gidari suspects that it might be possible to get a wiretap in order to listen in on an Echo, but the Wiretap Act specifies that such eavesdropping聽be聽a聽measure of last resort, only after 鈥渘ormal investigative procedures or reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed.鈥�
While the law may benefit from clarification to reflect emerging communication technologies, Americans鈥� attitudes towards privacy are shifting to meet it halfway. Gidari sees home assistants as merely another step in this process. 鈥淲ith every new app or service, there are stories that engender initial fear but that gives way over time to widespread adoption because the benefit outweighs the risks and people trust the companies enough. Ask your father whether he could have envisioned using a service that mechanically scanned all his mail to deliver ads to him in return for free postage!鈥�
In the end, Gidari鈥檚 message for Echo lovers is mostly optimistic. 鈥淓mbrace the future! Seriously, I think the risk is overstated today, but everyone should watch the product evolution.鈥�
