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Amazon's Alexa Is Coming To an Office Near You (axios.com)
Amazon announced today that it's bringing its voice assistant into a range of business settings, big and small, like hotels and co-working spaces. From a report: While people always think of Amazon as a consumer company, it has shown itself time and again to have larger ambitions. This move could help it expand tis business services beyond its already popular Amazon Web services. In an interview, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said that exposure to the workplace will improve Alexa by exposing it to new types of conversations. "The kind of language we use in our offices is sometimes radically different from the more conversational things we do in our(homes)," he told Axios. Alexa "will greatly improve by being exposed to different kinds of statements or conversations."
In countries where employees have some privacy rights, this could expose employers to legal risks.
Any hotel using this will drive my business elsewhere.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nothing like a huge corporate security leak.
What would be the rationale for putting Alexia into any business that would justify initial purchase and deployment costs? What about control of proprietary information? What about control of legally sensitive information?
Wow, seriously, no one can think of some possibilities here?
"Alexa, file a helpdesk ticket about the WiFi not working."
"Alexa, we need more coffee for the break room. Order some Kopi Luwak."
"Alexa, laugh maniacally whenever Steve says 'development'."
"Alexa, please translate the last several minutes of the VP of Marketing's presentation into actual English."
"Alexa, it's cold in here, turn up the thermostat." *next cubicle over* "Alexa, it's hot in here, turn down the thermostat."
Google, Amazon, Apple are all missing the point.
Technologies like this are fantastic, but only if you can wall them off from the outside world, at least as far as sending information goes.
Put it all on a chip, provide incoming links only, and robust protection against injection type attacks. So, no sending info out, and no using outside info to affect inside systems.
Tough nut to crack, I know. But that's the ticket!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As terrible as Lotus was at user interfaces, Lotus Notes had strong message encryption, digital signatures, and two-factor authentication as standard features all the way back in 1989. As such it was actually ahead of what most people have today.
The main problem was that you couldn't find administrators who understood any of that shit back in 1990.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We got an Amazon Echo at work to see if it's any use for business activities as it stands. First problem was that there's no way to configure a proxy server to gain access to Amazon (and other) remote servers, which is incredibly short-sighted of them.
Second issue is that an "obvious" business use is recording (and preferably transcribing) business meetings, but I was *shocked* that the Echo can't even take a simple voice note and record it for you for later access (never mind transcribing to text, which would be another essential feature).
As everyone has been pointing out here, everything the Echo does seems to go through Amazon's servers, so business confidentiality seems to be a major stumbling block to business acceptance. Heck, I can't even tell if the data goes out encrypted (without sniffing the network traffic) and is always stored encrypted.
"There were several court cases, where employers used surveillance against their employers, and they all lost"
Railway dispatchers and their airplane colleagues have had all their conversations, be that normal, per phone, radio, loudspeakers lawfully recorded since the dawn of time.
Also police officers are getting forced to wear cameras, their radio messages have also been recorded forever.
Supermarkets have had cameras for decades, they also cover the check-out personnel. Ditto for banks.
I could continue but it's now happy hour.
As an InfoSec guy, there is NO WAY IN HELL any of these type of devices are getting into my building.
In fact, I think our next infosec newsletter will mention keeping these away from work-from-home spaces, as well