Voice Control Devices
Voice control devices, popularized by Alexa Echo and existing in other products like Google Nest, respond to your voice commands to control devices in your house or to interact with the internet.
Voice control programs and the associated AI has been prominent on many phones since Apple added SIRI to the iPhone.
Though it is thought of as 'neat' tech and something to be excited about, privacy aware folks understand that these devices have introduced a level of surveillance and wiretapping that didn't exist before. Now it is likely that the majority of homes in the US are now connected to these microphones in one big giant surveillance network.
People fall for the story that the devices themselves are innocuos and fun. They have no idea about the technology of cloud-based voice recognition.
The inexpensive devices like the Alexa Echo in itself is just a cheap little Linux computer. The actual heavy lifting of voice recognition, AI, and voice transcription occurs in the cloud on the home servers of the device's parent (Amazon or Google). This means that by design, your voice has to be received by Amazon and then Amazon in turn sends the command results back to Alexa.
A quick read of the EULA of Alexa shows that your voice is recorded and stored. An independent researcher studying all the cloud based voice command services including Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa Echo shows that all of the EULA's of these products say they keep your voice data for some amount of time to help each of the companies improve their AI.
As it turns out 'some amount of time' is forever (so far) for all companies except for SIRI which has been retained only for six months.
These voice control devices have then turned into a wiretapping network. Officially you gave permission for these devices to wiretap you so it is not violating any laws by recording you. The worst part is that anyone who visits your home is also freely wiretapped because only one party in the conversation needs to agree to the wiretapping.
Some of these devices have already been witnesses to murders. I'm sure the device companies like Amazon and Google would be quite secretive in informing us of what was actually in the recordings in the house where the crime was committed. One of these days, it will be available in court proceedings and they will be forced to show you what is being recorded. I assume that it's everything.
Voice control devices, popularized by Alexa Echo and existing in other products like Google Nest, respond to your voice commands to control devices in your house or to interact with the internet.
Voice control programs and the associated AI has been prominent on many phones since Apple added SIRI to the iPhone.
Though it is thought of as 'neat' tech and something to be excited about, privacy aware folks understand that these devices have introduced a level of surveillance and wiretapping that didn't exist before. Now it is likely that the majority of homes in the US are now connected to these microphones in one big giant surveillance network.
People fall for the story that the devices themselves are innocuos and fun. They have no idea about the technology of cloud-based voice recognition.
The inexpensive devices like the Alexa Echo in itself is just a cheap little Linux computer. The actual heavy lifting of voice recognition, AI, and voice transcription occurs in the cloud on the home servers of the device's parent (Amazon or Google). This means that by design, your voice has to be received by Amazon and then Amazon in turn sends the command results back to Alexa.
A quick read of the EULA of Alexa shows that your voice is recorded and stored. An independent researcher studying all the cloud based voice command services including Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa Echo shows that all of the EULA's of these products say they keep your voice data for some amount of time to help each of the companies improve their AI.
As it turns out 'some amount of time' is forever (so far) for all companies except for SIRI which has been retained only for six months.
These voice control devices have then turned into a wiretapping network. Officially you gave permission for these devices to wiretap you so it is not violating any laws by recording you. The worst part is that anyone who visits your home is also freely wiretapped because only one party in the conversation needs to agree to the wiretapping.
Some of these devices have already been witnesses to murders. I'm sure the device companies like Amazon and Google would be quite secretive in informing us of what was actually in the recordings in the house where the crime was committed. One of these days, it will be available in court proceedings and they will be forced to show you what is being recorded. I assume that it's everything.
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