Amazon listens to us

You’ve ever heard of Siri, have you? It’s the virtual assistant Apple to which You can ask him for anything, ever since he remembers you at some specific time (or place, you can ask him to ‘Remind me when he gets home to check the alarm’).. Well, a few months ago he came to Spain. Amazon’s assistant, which is called Alexa.

What’s a virtual assistant for?

I use it a lot: I ask you to remind me of things, I say ‘take me home’ and automatically open the browser with the route from where I’m home, and, above all, I ask you to put on music from my favorite artist, my wife’s dance playlist or the podcasts I follow.

It might seem that an assistant created by Amazon would serve for shopping, and that’s basically it, but also you can add reminders, alarms, that put the music on or that light the home lights as it has technology ZigBee to connect with some of the devices we can have at home to automate certain things as we said at the entrance a few days ago.

The basic difference between Siri and Alexa is that Siri worked on Apple phones, iPads and computers (although we now have the HomePod, the intelligent Apple speaker that also integrates with Siri). Alexa, however, has arrived in Spain associated with the Amazon Echo devices, small (and not so small) smart speakers to whom you can ask to put music on, to light the light of the living room and, of course, to buy not what product in Amazon because they are always listening until they detect their name ‘Alexa’ and then process what comes next.

The obvious privacy problems

As you can imagine, From the beginning there have been many people concerned about the privacy of all this. The thing about having Amazon at home listening to everything you say is not very cool… I’m sure you’ll talk to your wife that you want to buy a new helmet for the bike and the next day you have Amazon helmets on every page you go in! Not to mention other things you may be talking to your wife with the speaker listening… and if it turns out that your word of safety for hard sex is’ Alexa ‘? It’s your turn to change it!

The point is, A few months ago, a German man asked Amazon for all the recordings they had of his house, that is, everything he had asked of Alexa.. Amazon sent him a mp3 file (or several, no idea) with toooodos the voice commands that Alexa had recorded: I asked him how long he was going to make in his area, made some purchase in Amazon, asked him to put music on, etc… But the surprise was that when he got to listen to all those minutes of audio, he heard not only what he had asked him, but that there was another user asking his corresponding Alexa for things… Amazon had missent his d

and other users.

This makes us think what method Amazon has followed to send you this information, it does not seem that it has been an automated method but a little more manual and hence the error of the operator in turn.

But The funny thing comes now… it turns out that the German man (let’s call him Johann) gets in touch with Amazon to tell them what had happened and his concern about whether his recordings could reach out to other users and don’t even listen to him… so Johann gets very angry and gets to listen to the recordings of the other German (let’s say he’s called Herman) and listen to Herman asking him for time data, some directions, some kind of music… and with all that he’s able to locate him!! Johann tells Herman the whole story and between the two they file a complaint to Amazon who is currently awaiting trial.

But it seems that it will end with a large fine related to the GDPR.

And it’s not here.

Even with this subject in court, Amazon decides to escape down and has patented a system by which his speakers would be recording continuously in case you think of saying something like ‘I want to hear music, Alexa’. So the word that makes it a trigger doesn’t have to be pronounced at first. If there is no trigger word, simply the speaker is dismissing everything he hears. What’s scary? The patent data are here in case you hire wants to go into the subject:

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What is clear is that the attendees have come to stay, more and more things can be asked and more and more are available: Hey Siri, OK Google, Alexa, Cortana (from Microsoft),… it is true that these attendees offer great help to blind people for example, as they can handle these systems almost entirely with the voice… but what about user privacy? Do you have any of these assistants and you use them? For now I just hope your word of safety for hard sex is not ‘Alexa’, otherwise there must be very funny recordings of you on one of the servers of the n

Amazon ube that are also sent by mistake to some other user.