I have the feeling, that the paper is flawed and missing an important experiment.
All their results seem to rely on skills being used.
There is indeed a need then for Amazon to prevent user tracking in skills (like for example Apple does and requires consent by the user).
But to come to the conclusion that Amazon shares the data with advertisers I would have expected an experiment with eliminating skills as a reason and just having personas interact with Alexa core services. I guess just from shopping questions or general knowledge questions a lot of information for ad targeting could be inferred. If that’s however not influencing ads served when no skills are used, then it’s not necessarily Amazon directly sharing the information, but the skills being able to do so using Amazons provided tooling.
That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.
They run this down as best they can (TLDR they don't think the skills have enough information about their personas to target ads to them, therefore Amazon must be doing the targeting, but they can't 100% rule it out):
> In contrast, skills can only rely on persona’s email
address, if allowed permission, IP address, if skills con-
tact non-Amazon web services, and Amazon’s cookies, if
Amazon collaborates with the skills, as unique identifiers to
reach to personas. Though we allow skills to access email
address, we do not log in to any online services (except
for Amazon), thus skills cannot use email addresses to
target personalized ads. Skills that contact non-Amazon web
services and skills that collaborate with Amazon can still
target ads to users. However, we note that only a handful (9)
of skills contact few (12) advertising and tracking services
(Table 1 and Figure 2), which cannot lead to mass targeting.
Similarly, we note that none of the skills re-target ads to
personas (Section 5.3), which implies that Amazon might
not be engaging in data sharing partnerships with skills.
Despite these observations, we still cannot rule out skills
involvement in targeting of personalized ads.
Additionally, they are trying to imply the common trope of “voice assistants are listening to everything we say all day for ads”, whereas their test methodology was to actively use the top skills for those interests and perform actions.
While I don’t like the sharing of such data for ads, it’s a far cry from Alexa processing voice in the background with zero interaction.
What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything? I don’t get that.
The discussion in the paper is nuanced on that point and does not make that claim as far as I read it. Section 2.2 (page 2):
> The content of users’ speech can reveal sensitive information (e.g., private conversations) and the voice signals can be processed to infer potentially sensitive information about the user (e.g., age, gender, health [82]). Amazon aims to limit some of these privacy issues through its platform design choices [4]. Specifically, to avoid snooping on sensitive conversations, *voice input is only recorded when a user utters the wake word*, e.g., Alexa. Further, only processed transcriptions of voice input (not the audio data) is shared with third party skills, instead of the raw audio [32]. However, despite these design choices, prior research has also shown that smart speakers often misactivate and unintentionally record con- versations [59]. In fact, there have been several real-world instances where smart speakers recorded user conversations, without users ever uttering the wake word [63].
> What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything?
For me, it's this: "Your Echos are Heard"
So, the opening salvo. That's what gives me the impression they imply voice assistances are listening to everything.
I don't refer to voice commands or normal interaction as "echos" so the user of the word "echos" here implies something nefarious. Sure, it's the name of the product, but for me, it reads like something more.
That was a hostile response for what seemed like a reasonable position.
Tell me samhw: If I told you I had a bunch of echos in my garage. Would you be wondering why I just said "I have a bunch of voice commands issued to my echo in my garage"? No. You would not.
Sorry, I don't mean to be overly harsh, but your comment amounts to
> I personally don't use the word 'echo' in connection to vocal communication, which (for some incomprehensible reason) means that, when someone else uses the word 'echo' thusly, they are implying something nefarious.
> Oh, and not just something nefarious, but specifically that they are eavesdropping on every word you say (also: every breath you take, every move you make, &c). Somehow.
> In summation: they are spying on everything you say, because they used the word 'echo' in their marketing material about a voice assistant. QED.
I mean, this is barely even intelligible as a line of reasoning. I assumed it was dashed off quickly and without really thinking. If it represents your considered opinion, then perhaps I'm missing something very obvious, I don't know.
> this is barely even intelligible as a line of reasoning.
You are literally engaging in a straw-man argument. Nobody said any of those things verbatim, no matter how much you wish they had. This is bad-faith commenting and you should consider taking a break to de-escalate.
> perhaps I'm missing something very obvious
The title "Your Echos are Heard" is a pun. One meaning of "Echos" is the Amazon product, and the other is a vocalization reflected back. It's stretch, to the point where it's technically spelled wrong for one of the meanings of the word. But it's a pun re-enforced with the word "heard" and thats enough for people to make the connection.
The complaint is that the article title heavily _implies_ the study finds devices are listening to your conversations unprompted, without actually doing any such science. The clickbait title is bad enough, but when there's already a partisan comment brigade ready to claim that "science is on their side" it's definitely worse.
> Nobody said any of those things verbatim, no matter how much you wish they had.
No, of course I'm paraphrasing. I hoped I had made it sufficiently comically obvious that no non-brain-damaged reader would ever believe I was representing that as a quotation, or even an unembellished paraphrase.
> The complaint is that the article title heavily _implies_ the study finds devices are listening to your conversations unprompted
I don't think anything implies 'unprompted' rather than 'prompted', and many people in this thread appear equally confused by that inference. I am in complete incomprehension of how "Your Echos Are Heard" suggests that the smart speaker is specifically listening to your unprompted speech.
> I don't think anything implies 'unprompted' rather than 'prompted'
> I am in complete incomprehension of how "Your Echos Are Heard" suggests that the smart speaker is specifically listening to your unprompted speech.
1. Wake word systems are by design, always on, always listening. At one level, the speaker _is_ listening to unprompted speech.
2. Those systems are imperfect. Pretty much everyone I know can describe at least one occasion on which a voice assistant accidentally triggered, and I have personally witnessed Siri transcribe the words said _before_ "Hey Siri."
3. There's an urban legend that FB or Amazon are, without any prompting, listening in on conversations, and using that to improve user profiles. Moreover we've seen several stories on HN lately about Zoom still sending data when the user has clicked mute, so people are more likely to make that connection.
4. Even the abstract uses the phrase "egregious privacy breaches" and doesn't provide sufficient clarity to distinguish between prompted and unprompted listening.
The title is ambiguous in a way that requires you to read the article to know whether this applies to unprompted or not -- both are equally supported conclusions IMO. And that same ambiguity lets anyone project their biases onto the article, retweet / repost / share, and demand. People are jumping to conclusions, certainly, but ambiguity interacts with "fast" social media in the form of people reading only the headlines before commenting.
Yes, I would agree with this. In other words, the word ‘echo’ entails nothing at all about whether it refers to prompted or unprompted speech (which of course it doesn’t). That’s precisely why their argument that “they must be referring to unprompted speech because they used the word ‘echo’” is not just illogical but utterly mystifying and verging on schizophrenic thought derailment.
I mean, come on, let’s recap what we’re talking about. This guy responded to this question:
>> What part of the paper gives you the impression they imply voice assistants are listening to everything?
With this answer:
> For me, it's this: "Your Echos are Heard"
> That's what gives me the impression they imply voice assistances are listening to everything.
> I don't refer to voice commands or normal interaction as "echos" so the user of the word "echos" here implies something nefarious.
This is the most brain-damaged nonsense I have ever heard in my life. They are seriously arguing that the word ‘echo’ is some sinister cryptic message indicating – for absolutely no reason any sane reader can decipher – that Amazon is listening to everything you say.
Come on. I know you’re committed to arguing that his comment is actually a brilliant masterpiece of logic, because I violated the law that One Must Always Be Superficially Polite and so the template dictates that I must be Actually Wrong and Humiliated for my Arrogance, but you can’t convince me that you really believe that garbage represents a reasoned thought.
(Incidentally, in case the original commenter is reading this, I should underscore that I’m not trying to attack him personally. We all say stupid shit now and then. I’ve said far more than my fair share. But no one gains from being nauseatingly insincere about it, as though it were a grave insult to acknowledge that someone said something silly on one occasion.)
Alexa uses the data we give to it by speaking and performing actions via downloaded skills - is very similar to all ad platforms, conveying user intent into ad profiles.
Saying “process voice for ads” has subtle connotations in the current landscape of privacy discussions.
>Alexa uses the data we give to it by speaking and performing actions via downloaded skills - is very similar to all ad platforms, conveying user intent into ad profiles.
There is an argument that this is more privacy conscience than other ad platforms. One needs to say the word "Alexa" before Amazon will collect any potential targeting data. There is an active and distinct choice that must be made before every interaction. That isn't true for Google and Facebook. They will collect data in the background while you are doing other things. There is much less transparency in when and how they are collecting their targeting data and therefore we have much less agency in the process.
As clarification, you are objecting to the phrase “process voice to [serve] ads” in the title which was provided by the submitter not the paper authors?
I think what it's actually showing (per Section 6.1) is that Amazon is using wishy-washy language to give the impression that they are not using voice recordings to build ad profiles on users[1]. They instead claim that it's for "personalized experiences" and "building inclusiveness".
This adorable little infographic on "the journey of a voice request" conveniently leaves out that it gets used for advertisement[2]. They have also made public statements that outright state that voice data doesn't get used for ad-targeting[3]
> They have also made public statements that outright state that voice data doesn't get used for ad-targeting[3]
“not use customers’ voice recordings for targeted advertising.”
I guess it depends on how one reads that quote. A trusting sort could read that to mean, we don't use anything we learn from voice recordings for targeted advertising.
A skeptic might read that quote and determine:
Well we generate metadata from the recording, and we then use the metedata for targeted advertising, but we don't use the actual recording for advertising.
Which makes sense, if I was to implement something like this, I wouldn't use the actual recording, I'd process the recording(which I have to do anyway to answer the request) and if I happen to save some useful for advertising data along the way, well, more $$'s for me!
Which one is true? I guess it mostly depends on how hungry Amazon is to make a buck and what they think they can get away with. As a privacy snob, I'd prefer the trusting version to be true.
NSA uses the same tricky language. Clapper got before the American people and said "nobody is reading your emails." What he didn't say is, computers are processing them because there's too many for people to read. In this case, I suspect Amazon is technically telling the truth, and automatic transcription into text is what drives their ad engine.
Yes exactly, the text is arguably data derived from voice recordings. So they can say that they don't use the voice recordings for ads, while omitting that they do use the derived text that was recognized for ads. It's unclear language but I wouldn't be surprised if this was the correct interpretation.
99% of people who read your comment (including me) won't have read the paper. You should cite the parts of the paper which made you come to the conclusion that they really only showed that ads are shown based on what you install, not based on what you say otherwise.
Reading the introduction section should be enough. It’s pretty clear that they’re talking about Amazon targeting ads based on your interactions with the Alexa and not, as the title here implies, based on just listening in to other things you say.
The paper does talk about “voice data” which I think is a bit misleading. “Voice data” to me would imply an analysis of the sounds your voice makes directly for ad targeting purposes but it’s clear enough from the context what they actually mean.
Amazon does plenty of rubish things already, no need for us to make up extra things!
From the introduction, it seems like their main concern is that "smart speakers record audio from their environment and potentially share this data with other parties over the Internet—even when they should not". They provide two examples of how that happens:
1. "Smart speaker vendors or third-parties may infer users’ sensitive physical (e.g., age, health) and psychological (e.g., mood, confidence) traits from their voice."
2. "The set of questions and commands issued to a smart speaker can reveal sensitive information about users’ states of mind, interests, and concerns."
They also mention that "smart speaker platforms host malicious third-party apps", and "record users’ private conversations without their knowledge", but that's mentioned as examples of prior research and thus seems to serve more as background than something this paper is trying to prove.
Point 2 is the one you're focusing on, and yeah, that's not surprising. You'd expect Amazon to build a profile on you based on the stuff you ask Echo to do (though the ethics of this certainly warrants discussion).
Point 1 would be the surprising thing, that smart speakers infer information about people from their voice, rather than from the commands themselves.
Their methodology seems to be to create multiple personas and compare the sorts of ads they get. In order to prove that information is inferred from traits of the voice rather than the words in the commands, they would need two personas which are identical in which commands they send but with different voices (female vs male voice, healthy vs smoker voice, something like that). From skimming section 3, it doesn't seem like they did that, so I'm forced to agree that the thing they prove in this paper (if their statistical methods are valid) is that Amazon builds an advertisement profile based on your interests as expressed in terms of which commands you're sending the device.
bullet 2 is at odds with your initial statement. The data collected are from interactions with the smart speaker. Here is the opening sentence of the abstract:
"Abstract—Smart speakers collect voice input that can be used to infer sensitive information about users".
I would be SUPER interested to see this same methodology applied to an iPhone or an Android phone resting in a room. I've already had the feeling that discussions that I had, later had an impact on my ads, but never knew if it was random or not.
I have mentioned this a number of times here on HN, but each time I'm told by other users that it just appears that way because the topic is fresh in my mind... I don't think that's the case.
Imo the truth is much scarier: advertises know us better than we known ourselves. There's also the idea that we are so alike, advertises can generalize to great success.
This is especially blatant when you don't fit into any category advertisers understand. Most of them think I'm either a hip urban youth or a well-off exurban housewife. I don't think they know what to do with someone who has associations, friendships, and interests that cross countless geographic and socioeconomic boundaries.
I think the truth is actually that we are MUCH less unique than we would like to believe, and that some combination of age + gender + location probably predicts like 80% of our interests.
The logic is that you talk about dozens of things around your phone per day yet you never see an ad targeted at you, you only notice it on the rare occasion it does happen. So either Apple is deciding to only target you with ads very rarely or it’s a rare coincidence.
Given the power demands of such an always-on analysis engine, that would show in battery runtime. At least if it's happening while the device is not plugged in.
On iOS, the word "Siri" can be detected at any time (if set so).
Maybe (just an hypothesis) there could be a set of other keywords also listened for, that once detected could start another more complex routine. Like that, you could limit the battery impact, and yet be able to listen to the users for advertising purpose.
On my Motorola from 8 years ago, the voice command was "OK, Google" or any custom short phrase you trained for it. But I think it would be really hard to get a useful but concise list of keywords... It would certainly be possible to listen for, say, "new Subaru" and show an ad if that one thing was detected, but the point is that you want to select which one of a million ads to show you'd need far more keywords, which gets computationally expensive quickly. It would probably be more battery efficient to compress audio that sounds like speech aggressively and then send it up to The Cloud for analysis...scary stuff, and part of the reason I don't have any home assistants!
A lot of people anecdotally believe this "they're listening", but I don't, since if it happens offline, it would consume a lot of power of the smart devices, and if it happens on the cloud, then the bandwidth and computing requirements would be gigantic and probably have poor ROI that it's not worth it. But maybe I'm overestimating those requirements.
Then again, I opened Instagram at a carwash once, and a few days later I got ads about car treatment products. I walked by an e-bike store the other day and stopped for about 15 seconds to look at the bikes being displayed, and a few days later Instagram started showing me ads for the brand. I thought Instagram or another Zuck-app was tracking my location, but I just checked and none of the Zuck-apps on my phone have location permission enabled.
Please, read the paper or at least the abstract before commenting. The paper is not about "at-rest" devices; it's about inferences made from the audio stream of activated commands. Ie, it's about the depth of processing done on "hey Alexa" commands, not the breadth of data that's being processed by the device.
The problem isn't the lack of knowledge. The problem is lack of alternatives. Name a single privacy preserving smart home assistant that the average person can buy, install, and use.
Market theory says people will vote with their wallet, which is why I boycott all of them. But I'm under no delusion that my behavior will change anything. Voting with your wallet only works if someone is willing to offer what you want.
> The problem is lack of alternatives. Name a single privacy preserving smart home assistant that the average person can buy, install, and use.
You are implying that all alternatives have to be "buying a smart home assistant". There is another alternative: Don't buy one. If all existing alternatives are bad, then not buying any is also a way to "vote by wallet". Then there will be a big market segment of not-having-bought-yets that can get tapped into by just coming with a privacy-preserving offering.
Unless you happen to be a blind person or something like that.
But I share your sentiment nonetheless, I have zero desire to become part of the group of persons that got used to voice control and would therefore miss it if it wasn't available (as long as I don't turn blind I guess)
For the blind however, I guess it's a huge win that ad-driven voice control gadgets exist and are available to them. I'm sure their options would be basically nonexistent if they were the entire market.
"Siri Data is associated with a random, device-generated identifier. This random identifier is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.
Siri Data and your requests are not used to build a marketing profile, and are never sold to anyone."
The same can be said for any commercial offering that you entrust data to. By that metric only fully self managed open source verified hardware is acceptable, right?
To be fair, that is a coherent, defensible stance to take. There are multiple reasons to go self-hosted, and "I don't trust companies not to screw me over" is definitely one.
The full title is "Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem"
It's about the interactions with Echos, and not as some other comments imply, about listening to general conversations passively. Although, the experiment setup might be used to study this in a future experiment.
I'm always surprised at others' surprise that voice assistants are data gatherers for ads (maybe except for Siri?). Isn't the entire business model just 2 things:
- Gather data for ads
- Corner the "smart assistant" market... so you can gather more data for ads
Most of these companies are not lacking in the amount of data the can collect about you.
I find it hard to believe that listening in on random conversations, collecting the audio stream, processing it, data mining it, accounting for substantial noise - is worth the effort for any of these companies.
Maybe for a smaller startup. When you're already a $1T company - this just doesn't seem like a good or valuable data source. Not to mention, it is an OBVIOUS gigantic hit to your trust.
That feels like the kind of thing that sounds good on the surface, but breaks down when you actually try to size it. The incremental value of that data vs search data seems nearly 0 - I would guess almost everyone who has searched for a fridge has said some variation of "fridge" out loud, and there would be so much additional noise from people who say it but aren't in any way intending to buy a new fridge.
But don't get me wrong, it is totally plausible that some eng team somewhere would still build it because it's a shiny new tech, it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that has any real world value.
I feel like you’re overestimating the difficulty of having a word cloud AI trained for relevant phrases. Not just fridge, but (to continue my poor example) “fridge doesn’t keep vegetables crisp long enough”, “wish my fridge had a screen”, “going to renovate the kitchen this summer”, “the neighbours have a better fridge than us, it’s red and shiny”. These are all juicy indicators for possible high-ticket purchases in the current sales cycle.
I think because the companies have stated outright that they're not using voice data for advertising, and people assume large companies aren't committing fraud against them.
I’m not surprised that asking “Alexa, what is the price of a flight from Moscow to Kyiv” will be processed for advertisement and personalization purposes, but I would be surprised if “Hey, John. Did you hear the news about Ukraine?” did.
The link below is 100% not how this happens as it’s owned by oracle, but if you’d like to read about text/nlp and how it’s used in adtech today from a technical perspective this is an excellent read. This product has been the #1 product in this space for many years.
From what is worth, I'm a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past.
I've always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion.
I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams/bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands/products/services that were mentioned in those audio streams.
In my understanding, showing ads for what people that are connected to you searched/bought/interacted, as in a simple network analysis, would be much cheaper and would give you very similar results.
It's not expensive at all when run on the edge device. Alexa can identify its name locally. You dont need dictation level accuracy to pick out advertising words, and if you miss some it's totally OK.
This paper is studying how requests to the smart speakers are used. Smart speakers translate requests into text, and I'm assuming the ads are just keyed off the resulting requests just like they would be if you put them into the search system manually.
Given your framing as "massive scale audio processing" to pick signals out of audio streams, I think you may have misread (or not read...) the paper.
It's not claiming Alexa is listening in while inactive. It's claiming that it's inferring user characteristics (age, health, etc) from the audio of voice commands, instead of just the post-transcription text.
Why? If I run a store and I learn about my customer’s interests, why shouldn’t I use that to make better offers? I don’t know why people are so freaked out by data collection. I just can’t believe that for all the data I share, I still get such shitty ads.
Ok, you own a store. A customer enters your store and buys a widget. Since you're smart and want to know everything you record the sale and add it to your database.
Only that's not where it stops.
After the customer leaves the store one of you minions follows him to every other store he ever enters to record what he buys, or even looks at
That's why your analogy falls completely flat.
Nobody would complain if it only concerns your store and your sales. But people violently dislike you snooping on everything that your customer does.
Worse! He doesn't even have to be a customer of yours. You snoop anyway, even into his most private affairs.
Worse! You report this information to government authorities, who monitor this and may decide at a future time that the things you were shopping for today mark you as a bad or suspicious person.
Worse! You also share this information with credit bureaus, meaning the data is available to potential employers. Thus limiting your job options.
Looked at a hookah once because you were curious? Sorry, no pot-heads in my company!
I don’t see the connection of this to the topic. Not trying to be obtuse. Are you saying it’s a slippery slope between targeted advertisements and 1984?
In my store analogy, I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white. To recognize that data collection is not some inherent evil. And sure, to point out that a store that tries to peep in your bedroom window should be called to task.
But your store analogy is stacking the deck in favor of your point. As the people responding to you pointed out, it falls apart when you consider all the larger implications of pervasive data collection. Would you defend the Stasi with the same language? I dont know why you're _trying_ to make this point and gaslight the people who are rightfully very concerned about the concentration of power this data collection results in
It's that pervasive data collection, even if it's 'only' outside your house, is quite bad.
> I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white.
Then you need to rethink your framing, because right now you're trying to split it into "store tracks transactions by itself and uses that data itself" and "tries to peep in your bedroom window".
Everyone else is talking about shades of gray too. But they're pointing out that 90% of the store-tracking shades have significant negative consequences.
The problem is that the government can compel ad targeting providers (and anyone in the advertising/marketing/data brokering industries) to reveal data about someone.
Those industries have essentially built a worldwide spying system that would make the NSA jealous without them even having to pay a dime and capitalism guarantees those systems will keep being maintained forever.
This a strawman. We're not talking about your friendly neighbourhood corner store here. We're talking about large scale systems with billions of users, systems that contain and shape a lot of our public discourse. The way these platforms make money inherently affects our society and our democracy. "Helping your customer" is irrelevant here.
I thought this was a topic about Alexa (a voice UI) using your voice (actually, installed skills) to deliver more targeted ads. I don’t see the public discourse connection here?
It's only a matter of time before Alexa will only read you the "right" kind of news as to remain advertiser-friendly. It already happens on mainstream social media, where beyond actual illegal content, plenty of legal content but that happens to be critical of the proverbial "establishment" gets demonetized, banned or even silently shadowbanned.
its one thing to have guest book in your store to gather feedback from your users, and totally another to follow your customers all the way back to their homes and listen what they talk about. main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.
Ok, let’s take the in store analogy. Agree that following someone home to spy on them is wrong. But in store, if I see a person looking at some items on a shelf and start to tell them about related items, doesn’t that violate the need for explicit consent? Expecting “full understanding” is too high a bar, IMO. Implicit consent, public notice and opt out are sufficient. Otherwise you end up with GDPR cookie opt ins that only train people to indiscriminately push “accept” buttons.
I don’t think anybody claims that you need consent to do the equivalent of displaying “other products you may like”. The customer entered the store willingly, and what you describe is quite literally the job of a shop assistant.
The need for consent would come if the assistant were to record the entire conversion you have with the customer, and send it to Facebook or Amazon in exchange for money.
I was responding to the claim about “main thing is customer explicit consent. one where customer fully understands what he consents to.” Maybe I misunderstood.
A lot of fiction isn't just about "look at this whacky world I invented". Especially dystopic fiction usually tries to tell us something about our own world and its potential future.
But the main point with my comment was to re-frame what was advocated, from their fantasy of "one small store owner doing the best for their customers" into "a surveillance system where every corporation tracks your every move for profit".
A bit more than a decade ago, in a meeting at Lab126 where we were discussing a then secret future product with voice recognition -- in particular "keyword spotting", so that it could wake up on command -- I said something like: "I doubt this will work, to get high enough accuracy we'd have to stream data constantly for analysis, and consumers would have to expect this. No one would buy it."
I've since learned never to underestimate the naivete of others.
It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive.
On several occasions I've seen ads appear based upon things being discussed, but never searched. Always with the realization I was near a smart device with a microphone (or an app with permissions)
I think in hindsight this will be similar to the realization that systems like XKeyscore and PRISM were not only technically possible but already deployed.
> It's baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it's too computationally expensive.
If i am not mistaken - this paper seems to look at explicit "Smart Speaker interactions" - not passive background listening which is what I believe you are alluding to.
Not arguing that I am saying that latter does/doesn't happen - but just that this paper is not proof of it. And there is a big difference.
I think this could be implemented without listening: I am physically meeting with my friend X who is researching online for his new acquisition (or he already got it). The more obsessed he is with that, the bigger the chances he'll tell me how awesome such a thing is.
So algorithms can percolate his interests to me after we meet and some time it would happen that we talked about it too.
Humans are pattern recognition machines. We are so good at it that we even pickup on what seem like patterns but are actually random noise.
Maybe not the best example (please chime in if you have a better one!), ha you ever shopped for a specific model of used car? Once you're on the hunt, suddenly you'll start seeing them everywhere when you're out and about, even though previously you didn't notice. There aren't more of that vehicle on the road than before, but now you're attuned to the pattern.
Smart speakers and phones are NOT listening to every single thing around it 24/7 in order to serve you ads. That's simply just not how it works. There are hundreds of other data points on you that can be used for this like your AMEX/Visa/Mastercard purchase history and etc.
On top of that, it would be easily detected via networking monitoring.
OOOOooooooohhh this one's really drawing a lot of damage control. Simple anecdotal evidence was enough to convince me and many other people years ago that Google and Amazon, at the very least, were spying in every way possible. Why wouldn't they? Users have technically agreed to all data collection anyway. It simply doesn't make sense to not collect data, if there is an option to.
Honestly I can't see why anyone has these smart speakers anyways. Best case scenario is what, saving a minute by not typing in a Google query or phone number?
Doesn't seem like a sufficient benefit when you consider the downside -- a device listening to your conversations and selling that data to ad agencies.
Ad agencies hearing that I want to know the weather, dad jokes, recipes, turn on and off my lights, and to listen to smooth jazz is literally the least of my problems when it comes to data being shared/sold.
Just like anything, there’s a trade off and, for the case of convenience, I’m willing to make the trade off between convenience of talking to a device to do tasks for me and having an ad agency learn what music I listen to that Amazon is probably selling to them anyway since I use the Amazon Music service.
I get your skepticism and applaud it, but you have to remember 99% of the population doesn’t know, care at all, or is willing to make the trade off, whereas the 1% are some of those folks amassed here on HN.
I upvoted specifically, because this is effectively how a lot of users see this feature ( admittedly based on anecdata ). I might even expand on it. Most users do not even see a trade-off. Most see pure benefit.
But.. there is hope as jokes along the lines 'Wiretap, what is the time?' seem to have become more common.
I know Amazon isn't doing a whole helluva lot with the data they're collecting on me via their UI nor their devices; if they were, I would have a lot better recommendations than they offer to me on the regular. Yes, recommendation engines are hard, but Amazon has the computational power, resourcing, and data to do it well, yet they're simply not.
So. For now, I'm fairly convinced the data collected are useless/meaningless and I'm happy to go about my day w/o much worry. If I suddenly start seeing much better targeted recommendations, I'll rethink my strategy.
I.. have a problem with this line of reasoning. If the data is there, it will be used; maybe it will not be used now, but it will used and you have little control over how and when..
And heavens know how much better we will get at it. I am retard at analytics and the things I saw are already absolutely amazing. Just because ads can't seem to show you relevant information is not a good indication Amazon can't infer you like midget porn.
Main one for us is home automation - being able to turn on/off lights, heating, hot water etc is very convenient, saves time [1], money and improves home security.
Can't speak for G's offering, but currently Rest of Ear of Sauron Alexa and chipper, but particularly thick, Siri either don't work very well or fall into the easy to live without novelty category for us.
[1] Particularly around Xmas, lots of switchs which are almost always buried somewhere behind the tree ...
It's unfortunate we have to consider the downside. That said, using Siri for common tasks saves time. It might only be 10 to 30 seconds here and there, but add that up over a day, a week, a year... and then multiply by millions of people... The time savings is massive. I expect the capabilities to grow, and adoption to grow, because it's more convenient.
As a software engineer I found it very very interesting how voice input feels.
It is different because it's always available without looking for your phone on one site and on the other it actually removes the need to have your phone with you all the time.
It also feels much more natural.
Independent of the benefits, I have a smartphone with a microphone, webcam, Laptops etc. The sentiment that a hardware verified device starts to listen in after specific keywords is for me less of an issue than all the other devices I just mentioned.
I really think that natural voice input will be the future. I want a personal assistant in my flat. And if Elon musk now starts the robot war, those robots will be controlled by voice. I'm pretty sure about it. I also saw plenty of ml research which indicates that.
Edit: and yes voice is so much more practical when you cook or in the shower.
Based on anecdotal experience, giving a smartphone app access to your microphone "while using the app" results in targeted ads for things you were talking about within 10-15 minutes of having the app open. I haven't done any strict science to confirm it, but I'm obsessive about privacy and can almost always track down the likely reason when I get an accurately targeted ad. I'm my opinion, it's naive to think that our voices aren't being processed by tech companies to serve ads at every opportunity. I'm glad to see some analysis proving it, and I think we need more of that because the problem definitely isn't limited to Amazon.
As other commenters in the thread have pointed out, this might not be as quite a smoking gun as it would appear.
However, I still feel weird with these devices in the room. I have decided I am not going to trust them, I won't ever trust them, and I'm blaming them until they show us the code.
I know I'm a doomer and a fatalist, but holy crap we are sleep-walking into dystopia. Your average HNer might be a little more attuned to the possibilities for abuse here, but the billions of clueless customers and hundreds of billions of dollars to be made will just keep tempting these behemoths further over the line and renormalize all of society around pervasive surveillance capitalism.
The entire psychological context of life has changed, and I'm not super OK with it, TBH.
That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.