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Amazon Explains Why Alexa Recorded And Emailed A Private Conversation (mercurynews.com)
Amazon has issued the following statement about why their Alexa device recorded a woman's private conversation and then emailed it to one of her friends:
Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as "right." As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.
This apparently didn't satisfy the woman whose conversation was recorded, according to the Mercury News:
Now her family has unplugged all the devices, and although Amazon offered to "de-provision" the devices of their communications features so they could keep using them to control their home, Danielle and her family reportedly want a refund instead.
When reached Friday, an Amazon spokeswoman would not comment about whether the company will issue a refund.
Other smart home speakers carry similar privacy risks. Last year, for example, Google had to release a patch for its Home Mini speakers after some of them were found to be recording everything.
This apparently didn't satisfy the woman whose conversation was recorded, according to the Mercury News:
Now her family has unplugged all the devices, and although Amazon offered to "de-provision" the devices of their communications features so they could keep using them to control their home, Danielle and her family reportedly want a refund instead.
When reached Friday, an Amazon spokeswoman would not comment about whether the company will issue a refund.
Other smart home speakers carry similar privacy risks. Last year, for example, Google had to release a patch for its Home Mini speakers after some of them were found to be recording everything.
Its a feature and working as intended
You want privacy? Don't use these assistants. It's not that hard.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The devices functioned as designed. They listen to things 24/7 and respond accordingly. Its not amazon's fault you let 'someone' inside your home to listen to everything you say. It would be just like a bank teller, or cashier, or waiter misunderstanding you.
"woke up due to a word in background conversation", "At which point, the background conversation was interpreted" and "Alexa then interpreted background conversation as "right.""
;)
OK, so these deices ARE listening to everything at all times. But don't worry. It will only be used in good ways.
I think the PR department is going to be working over time to cover this one over.
Just my 2 cents
If only these devices had a button to stop them paying attention.
Oh wait.
+----------------- | What is the question!
This is pretty sensationalist and, overall, poor summarizing. The actual story is nothing like the summary. Yes, the Alexa recorded the conversation and sent it. That is true, but the women's reaction of unplugging them all was immediate and NOT after Amazon's response. This summary portrays the order wrong to sensationalize. Also, the Google Mini issue was limited to very few devices and discovered before general release. The feature (bug) causing the issue was disabled before going on sale to the general public. Then permanently disabled when a fix was not possible. Seriously, the actual story is barely longer than the summary and much better. Do better.
Computers are scary, but call them "telephones" and folks trust them. Meanwhile, anything euphemistically called "smart" really means "a computer you do not, and cannot, control." Those of us without such nefarious gadgets are increasingly treated as second-class citizens. You want a taxi? Sorry, we got rid of those, and without a "smart" so-called "telephone" you can't get a ride anymore. Everyone on the street goes around in a daze under the spell of these gadgets. Remember, we have always been at war with Oceania...
The tap is not an active listener by default. You can make it one. I prefer not to.
Also, that feature to send messages has to be set up by the user. Otherwise it will not know your contacts.
The fact that they know what happened to this level of detail means that it's always recording and they can go back to their records far enough, even days later.
Turn this shit off.
I saw this scenario coming a mile away. When you use a constant listening device that can execute actions on your behalf with very poor AI then this will happen. Until the AI can rival human intelligence then this device can not be relied upon.
If Alexa was truly decent at understanding spoken language, this wouldn't happen without the user giving specific commands. It goes to show, with current state of AI they are still just doing a lot of approximation and guessing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
By which I mean a microphone + small digital processor capable of assessing how close you are talking to the device listening. If you are not within - say - 5 feet of the device, the device would ignore and instantly discard all audio it hears. If you were within 4 feet on the other hand, it would listen for any voice commands to the device. Also, ALL voice recognition should happen ON the device, NOT in the cloud as cloud-crazy people like Satya Nadella might prefer it. One more fix would be a proximity sensor that checks whether you are standing withing a certain active area in FRONT of the device, or whether you are somewhere else, talking to a friend on the phone for example. How hard is it to actually walk up to the "smart speaker" when you need to give it instructions? Of course the real fun begins when various foreign govts, hackers and corporations start to hack into your speaker remotely. But even there, having to stand in front of it and be within a certain distance from the device would help, if there is a hardware chip/ASIC that blocks any audio received "against the safety distance" from getting to any hackable part of the device.
I wonder if part of this is that Alexa is suffering from a problem that, for example, autistic people sometimes suffer. For people without such issues it seems so obviously easy that we do it without thinking, but consider the question: "how do you know when someone is talking to you?" Can you name a fixed set of criteria that are always reliable and don't return false positives? It's harder than you think, and I suspect one of the problems Alexa and her ilk are having is that they don't actually know what the cues are that they could give Alexa to make sure she knows that people are actually talking to her, so they rely on keywords that, as in this case, have a statistically small but nonzero probability of coming up in actual conversation.
Their own voice recognition software is crap.
...Danielle says she unplugged all the devices, and she repeatedly called Amazon. She says an Alexa engineer investigated. "They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' ...
( https://www.kiro7.com/news/loc... ) I wonder what else is in those logs...
Nah! Get rid of 'em. Nobody needs these devices in the first place.
Was this comment supposed to be productive?
Ninety-nine percent of our economy (at least in the first world) is based on things that nobody really needs but are convenient. TV, radio, pre-manufactured clothing, pre-woven cloth, potato chips, etc. It's all convenience so we can spend our time doing things other than subsistence farming or hunting.
I'm trying very hard to remember the last time I needed /., or that anyone really needed it, and yet you are here posting as if your comment meant something and we needed to read it. Go figure.
Hilarity ensues..
Alexa, don't shit on the rug!
Alexa, whose a good girl?
Alexa: "To confirm you'd like to send this message repeat 5... 6... 8"
User: "5... 6... 8"
There. Pick 3 random positive integers for the send code each time.
I believe I'm being productive by getting rid of unproductive and useless toys.
Your comment had nothing to do with you getting rid of things you don't want. It was telling others what they don't need and they should get rid of them. That's the non-productive part.
You are free to define what you want and need. Not so much when you try to do it for everyone else. The latter is just arrogance and completely unproductive.
This can go on endlessly. Actually I do get rid of pretty much everything I don't want, or is broken, or creates needless distraction--oh yes, that includes losing the TV several years ago. I'm a professional Luddite, I guess. But I'm getting a lot more stuff done.
"Convenient"? In what way are these "convenient"? They save you the two seconds it takes to get your fat ass up out of the chair and turn a dial somewhere? Jesus Christ. You know what else is convenient? http://www.eatmedaily.com/word...
Have some fucking dignity.
I don't respond to AC's.
Aaaachooo!
Alexa: "Confirmed, you new Maserati is on its way..."
Table-ized A.I.
The fact they can come to some conclusions in this investigation suggests Amazon retains logs a lot of data about every Alexa installed. Do they have the full audio record? Just the commands?
I'm not going to hand out the smug, pointless "Told you so!" answer either.
The real problem is that people buy these new technologies with unrealistic expectations. Then they get angry when it can't live up to them.
I work in I.T. and I see examples, all the time, of technologies failing in totally unexpected ways. Even the best voice recognition systems I've ever used get my commands wrong at least 1 out of 4 times or so. That doesn't enthuse me about having an "always on" system trying to take commands properly when it's going to hear all sorts of random conversations all day long that don't involve it.
Did they never think that the might be used in a noisy environment. It has been suggested that the system was trying to confirm, but the volume was to low for the user to notice. May the system should automatically deactivate when the system volume is too low for proper functionality.
Suddenly google is recording everything and sending it to my gmail account. I did not *ask* for or desire this feature.
I can't find a way to disable it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I cannot resist repeating it : :-)
Anything euphemistically called "smart" really means "a computer you do not, and cannot, control."
Thank you for this
Herve S.
1) Alexa did exactly what it was designed to do.
2) It's speech recognition is a bit too sensitive
3) The whole world got a wake up call about what these horrendous, evil, machines do.
4) Most people still do not realize how stupid they are for installing clear and obviously ACTIVE espionage device into their home just to avoid having to push a button on their supposedly innactive espionage device that they carry with them all the time (cell phone).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Based on the description of the problem, the Echo gave multiple audible prompts. How did no one in the family even hear that and go WTF?
If a foreign voice barged into my conversation with someone, that would immediately catch my attention. So something seems off about this story to me. Either the family's situational awareness is worse than that meme of the guy repeatedly getting barreled over by a bull, or they turned the volume down on the Echo to the point of inaudibility, which defeats the entire point of having the thing in the first place, or there are shenanigans at play.
Considering how callously companies are using AI these days, seems to me that shenanigans are only slightly less likely than user ineptitude.
I know seasoned security guys, some of them with beyond TS clearances and they think these things are great at home. I said - so you think it's a great idea that you have a microphone that you even paid for in all of your rooms and it's accessible to the Internet? Even when I put it that way they want to keep them. It's so handy, I can set a timer, reminders, get the weather, etc.
These are guys that I wouldn't have thought were stupid.
So I suppose NSA really isn't listening to them or they'd be called into an office.
I guess if your kid is named Alexa you are in for lots of fun in the future.
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.