Thursday, December 29, 2016

Your gadgets are listening, and the government can too...

Growing popularity of voice activated technology in smartphones and home automation devices means that many Americans are never more than a few feet from a device capable of recording conversations they may assume are private. But a warrant recently obtained by police in Arkansas should serve as a reminder that Americans are willingly bugging their own homes.

Officers in Arkansas are currently hoping the evidence they glean from the recordings on one of Amazon’s popular Echo devices will give them a break in a Bentonville murder investigation.

The Amazon Echo is a popular home automation device which looks like a regular speaker but is always listening on standby for users to utter its wake words. The device, with the help of a virtual personal assistant named Alexa can deliver weather reports, cue a favorite song, dictate a recipe and even order pizza or make dinner reservations via voice commands.

The upside of the device is convenience; the downside is that users tether their phones and troves of personal information to the device and then allow it to listen in on their day-to-day conversations in the home.

When echo users wake the device by addressing “Alexa” directly, the device begins recording commands to save on Amazon’s servers for the purpose of improving its voice recognition capabilities. Full story...

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