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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.
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
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 .
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
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.
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.
From TFA:
The heart of Amazon’s claim is that Alexa devices could provide insights into a person’s entire life, and having two days worth of audio would be an unreasonable invasion of that privacy. Knowing that law enforcement has the ability to request data from these devices and peruse them at will would have a chilling effect on people using the services—which clearly would be bad news for Amazon’s business.