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Amazon Argues That Alexa Is Protected By the First Amendment in a Murder Trial (qz.com)
Amazon is sticking to its guns in the fight to protect customer data. The ecommerce giant has filed a motion to quash the search warrant for recordings from an Amazon Echo in the trial of James Andrew Bates, accused of murdering friend Victor Collins in Bentonville, Arkansas in November 2015. And it's arguing that the responses of Alexa, the voice of the Echo, has First Amendment rights as part of that motion. From a report on Quartz: The company's lawyers claim that Alexa's recordings and responses are subject to free speech protections under the US constitution's bill of rights, and that prosecutors need to provide more evidence that this audio is essential to the case. "It is well established that the First Amendment protects not only an individual's right to speak, but also his or her 'right to receive information and ideas,'" Amazon lawyers wrote in a court filing. "At the heart of that First Amendment protection is the right to browse and purchase expressive materials anonymously, without fear of government discovery." Amazon also referenced a 2014 case involving Chinese search giant Baidu, where a court ruled that results returned by a search engine are protected by the First Amendment.
My concern is that they aren't just saying that they don't have anything to hand over because nothing exists. Since they're not saying this, I'll assume that they do have something that could be handed over. Alexa? No thanks, I'll pass.
If so, shouldn't the decision about whether or not to release that info be up to the victim's family - whoever now has ownership over his estate? You would think that if the recordings would help in prosecuting the murderer that they would want to release them. I could see Amazon's argument if they were being compelled to release something belonging to the accused, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.
William George
Alexa. Next.
* just my opinion that the suspect is indeed a murderer, and my 1st amendment right to express my opinion that Amazon is protecting them.
First amendment does not stop human from having to go trial as witness, at worst you can invoke the fifth, to not incriminate yourself (in case you are the criminal). Standing to trial has nothing to do with the government making law saying your opinion must be squashed, otherwise human would keep taking the first to avoid delivering data on a search warrant .
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Holy shit... I guess a broken clock is right every now and then.
More bullshit fodder for a technology that is easily bypassed by built-in DNS entries.
Thus proving he knows nothing about real security.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
>At the heart of that First Amendment protection is the right to browse and purchase expressive materials anonymously, without fear of government discovery...
Argues the company that has a $600 million dollar deal with the CIA for cloud computing services.
Under the treaties that the US signed with the EU and with Canada, this applies to all such recordings - even in the US or stored in the US - of any conversations of citizens of the EU and of Canada.
Next time, don't sign treaties which overrule laws passed by Congress.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
In most cases, evidence held by a third party is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. (This is bullshit but it is precedent). I imagine Amazon is going for a novel First Amendment argument here because the Fourth Amendment argument is a loser. I doubt it will get anywhere. I could hope it would make people think twice about bugging their own houses, but they won't.
Subpoena Alexa/Amazon as a witness, then.
She might need an interpreter.
As much as I'm a supporter of personal privacy rights and data privacy, Amazon is way off with this argument. It is so clearly an attempt to forestall future insistence / requests by authorities for Amazon to be involved in extracting data and having to devote resources to this kind of request. Kind of like Apple with the iPhone but for less believable reasons.
First of all, the 1st Amendment protection is about the right to speak and publish opinions, or the right not to be forced to speak or publish opinions. Neither Amazon's nor the victim's right to speak or right not to be required to speak a certain message is at stake when the Alexa recording's history is discovered. The same would hold for your or my browser history being subpoenaed as evidence. That is a privacy issue, not a free speech issue, and nowhere in the Constitution is privacy an enshrined right, much as even I would like to believe.
These would be much more plausible arguments for Amazon to take:
- That the government has not demonstrated that delving into the user's private search history is relevant or may advance the case at all,
- That the data is not the property of the individual but rather a trade secret, or
- That Amazon is an unrelated 3rd party and should not be compelled to cooperate in something which it is peripherally related.
I actually think Amazon might fail on all of these fronts, because if the Alexa can record things like the sounds of a crime or victim asking for help, it's pretty plausible that they could be compelled to do so for multiple good arguments. It's not even like the data is being heavily shielded or stored securely as a selling point, as Apple's was. The very purpose of Alexa's data is to make purchasing and buying things from Amazon easier! It would be like Nest saying that the video it recorded in someone's home who got murdered was private and subject to free speech protections. Because no one shares videos, right?
Treaties need ratification. That usually happens with a lower house of elected representatives. Treaties also are negotiated by teams put together by elected officials. If a treaty supercedes a law, it is still democratic. The people voted in the politicians to make these decisions on their behalf.
Amazon have a right to this information, but the government does not?
More like Amazon wants to sell Echos without fear of the public's discovery that there actually exist enormously long recordings to be acquired (whether by government subpoenas or hackers or Amazon's marketing department, or whatever).
Remember when another party's "listening device" in your home was something that paranoid people worried about? Now it's something that people pay to have done to them.
My guess here would be that there's some kind of bad legal reporting going on. I don't see any links to the actual documents filed with the court, so I'm going to take this as fake news until we see reports from someone who can break down the legal argument being made and not just snip a few odd quotes from it.
Yes, Amazon is claiming First Amendment protections for their users of Alexa and NOT for Alexa "herself".
But let's not have that interfere with the sensational title of the linked article: "Amazon argues that Alexa is protected by the First Amendment in a murder trial".
Contrary to that title the author wrote:
Most states have strict laws about recording conversations without informed consent. Even if the owner has given consent to Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft to listen for commands, visitors and others might not have. And it could be illegal for them to record anything before getting consent.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The roots of what would later be called "The robotics rights movement" began early in 2017, when the shopping giant, Amazon, asserted that its weak AI based shopping assistant could legally claim rights enshrined to "The people" in the US constitution. The far reaching effects of this legal precedent would not be challenged again until late 2037, during the historic murder trial of Roomba X36-1. which led directly to the robotic riots of 2038, based largely in the recently annexed New California republic
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I had not realized that Alexa had become self aware. SkyNet is going to jealous that he was not the first.
Bates should just marry Alexa. She can't be compelled to testify against her spouse.
Heck, she's already got his credit card.
Have gnu, will travel.
Trying to come off like you are protecting the rights of your customer sounds noble. But what is really happening is that you are worried people won't want to buy or use your service if they realized all their conversations were actually being recorded through Alexa. If you were to give up your files to investigators then it would known that Alexa is nothing but a spy bot.
So they're claiming that anything a robot says is covered under the 1st Amendment?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You can see all the recordings associated with your account in the Alexa app on your phone. And delete anything you want to delete. You are only recorded when you use the wake word, and you can even delete the past recordings if you want (and they are truly deleted).
So many of these posts are pure paranoia by people who haven't even bothered to look at the Amazon privacy policy or any explanation of how the device works.
The Echo belongs to the suspect. (Alternate link if you don't trust that site.
You're probably thinking of the San Bernardio iPhone case. Most people think the phone belonged to the shooter. It didn't. It belonged to the San Bernardino County government. They assigned it to the shooter for work use. Apple refused to help the legal owner of the phone unlock it.
There is no hidden cell hardware in there. As for the data, there are many people, including plenty of Slashdotters, who work on Alexa and can see the data. This would be a hard secret to keep.
Amazon is foremost a marketplace that values customer trust since that trust drives repeat business. Damaging that trust would cost a lot more in retail sales than the gains from somewhat better personalization from spying on you.
I think you can safely take the privacy policy at face value.
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