Comment by Aeolun
3 years ago
I mean, you carry a listening device with you almost 100% of the time. Why would you even worry about the Alexa in your home?
3 years ago
I mean, you carry a listening device with you almost 100% of the time. Why would you even worry about the Alexa in your home?
For me, the difference is that the phone (with voice assist turned OFF) is not supposed to be listening all the time, while a device like Alexa is supposed to be listening. I don't want devices listening so I turn that feature off when I can and avoid the device when I can't.
Is the phone listening anyway? Maybe, but that violates a privacy expectation, and there may be recourse if someone discovers it's doing that.
I work on Alexa and for whatever it’s worth, I can confirm that Amazon is telling the truth about how Alexa listens and about what is done with your data.
This is all publicly available info, and perhaps there’s no reason why you should trust me any more than you trust Amazon as a company, but as one privacy-conscious engineer to another, I promise that your ambient conversations are not being stored or sent to Amazon and that any data you delete in the app (either by specifying an auto-delete period or manually deleting it) is actually, really, truly deleted.
A process running locally on your Alexa device listens for the “wake word”.[0] This audio is only processed locally within a constantly-overwritten memory buffer, it is neither stored nor transmitted. Only once the wake word is detected does Alexa begin to transmit an utterance to the cloud for processing. I’ve worked with the device stack and it really isn’t transmitting your ambient conversations.
Within the Alexa app[1], you can see and hear all of your stored data and can delete any of it. You can also control the duration after which it is auto-deleted. From working with ASR datasets, I can confirm that deleted audio (and the associated text transcript) is really deleted, not just hidden from your view.
I never owned an Alexa or other smart home device before I worked on it, and I’m not sure I’d buy another company’s device where I lack the same ability to “trust but verify”, so I’m not sure how much weight my word should carry. But I can give my word that Alexa is not transmitting your ambient conversations or just setting “deleted=true” in a database when you tell it to delete your data.
[0] see page 4 of https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011
I definitely understand your point, but I think the greater issue is why should this have to serve as a rationalization in the first place? Why can't we expect our phones to serve us rather than the other way around?
That's a fallacy. The average "listening device" it's not constantly recording and uploading audio. We would notice if it did.