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Police Request Amazon Echo Recordings For Homicide Investigation (cnet.com)
Tulsa_Time quotes a report from CNET: Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot are in millions of homes now, with holiday sales more than quadrupling from 2015. Always listening for its wake word, the breakthrough smart speakers boast seven microphones waiting to take and record your commands. Now, Arkansas police are hoping an Echo found at a murder scene in Bentonville can aid their investigation. [First reported by The Information, investigators filed search warrants to Amazon, requesting any recordings between November 21 and November 22, 2015, from James A. Bates, who was charged with murder after a man was strangled in a hot tub. While investigating, police noticed the Echo in the kitchen and pointed out that the music playing in the home could have been voice activated through the device. While the Echo records only after hearing the wake word, police are hoping that ambient noise or background chatter could have accidentally triggered the device, leading to some more clues. Amazon has not sent any recordings to the officers but did provide Bates' account information to authorities, according to court documents. The retailer giant said it doesn't release customer information without a "valid and binding legal demand." "Amazon objects to over-broad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course," the company said in a statement. Even without Amazon's help, police may be able to crack into the Echo, according to the warrant. Officers believe they can tap into the hardware on the smart speakers, which could "potentially include time stamps, audio files or other data."] Police also found a Nest thermostat, a Honeywell alarm system, wireless weather monitoring in the backyard and WeMo devices for lighting at the smart home crime scene. Officers have also seized an iPhone 6S, a Macbook Pro, a PlayStation 4 and three tablets in the investigation.
People intentionally bugging their own homes and paying a corporation for the privilege to do so.
Color me right, I never would've though that this would happen. this is why I won't have this sort of device in my home. Soon, they'll asking for all sorts of info...
From the summary:
Police also found a Nest thermostat, a Honeywell alarm system, wireless weather monitoring in the backyard and WeMo devices for lighting at the smart home crime scene. Officers have also seized an iPhone 6S, a Macbook Pro, a PlayStation 4 and three tablets in the investigation.
All those gadgets, but this guy didn't have a security camera?
Redundancy is good And also good.
my dad has a voice command TV, it listens to him yell at politicians and hippies, I don't think it actually activates anything, but he feels better about it. Improved technology would allow activation by throwing things at it.
Nullius in verba
Told us what? The police asking for something that doesn't exist has been a given for many years. They seem to be clueless as to how the Echo works. ... kind of like you.
The suspect said he went to bed at 1:00 AM with the4 victim alive, then woke up at 8:30 to find him dead. The water meter indicates the drowning occurred between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM.
ANY recording of the suspect's voice between 1:00 AM and 8:30 would probably indicate that the suspect is lying. Even if he checked the weather forecast at 4:00 that would indicate he wasn't asleep as claimed.
On the other hand, if records or witness testimony indicates that the habitually suspect uses the Echo several times per hour and he did NOT use it between 1:00 and 8:30, that would be consistent with his claim that he was asleep, somewhat corroborating his story.
Privacy is out the window.
I write about this shit a lot and it's similar to the "War on Piracy" in that when crap is digitized, it's essentially in the public domain.
My fucking car rats me out via a service I use. My phone does. My desktop and all my tablets do, too.
I get made when I buy shit at Walmart, via receipts and security cameras.
There ain't a goddam thing that's going to change all that, so we have only two choices:
A.) Get over it.
B.) Get used to it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So basically the guy's alibi might have held up if (1) he hadn't used his phone after he claimed he went to sleep, and (2) the water meter didn't show significant activity in the house after he claimed he went to sleep (police think he was busy washing away any evidence).
C. Start slitting throats.
Good-bye
'ok google' sounds enough like the noises one makes while drowning that maybe it activated on the victims struggles. :p
I refer you to my previous comment on this theme and the ridiculous posts which fail to debunk the always-listening = spying theme by claiming to know what proprietary software does. Not only are such claims ridiculous on their face, but even if the spying were handled locally, it's trivially easy to record, compress, and store data from the device either uploading it with other data when the user expects something to be uploaded or buffer the spying fruit until a later time. And there's nothing stopping interesting background information from being captured too. The purpose of the captured data is subjective—a tracker owner may have intended to use the device to do one thing, but the background audio/video reveals something of interest in another context. The solution, of course, is to grant computer owners as much control over their computers as they can have by having all computers run nothing but free software.
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