The IT Nerd

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Amazon has joined Apple in it will now let customers disable human review of their Alexa recordings. Clearly Amazon felt it had to do something to match Apple in terms of addressing this issue before someone else does it for them. As is the case with Google and the Germans who didn’t like this at all.

My question is, does this end this issue? Or is it going to continue?

You might remember this story about Amazon employees having access to what you say to your Amazon Alexa. Well, this story has just taken a bit of a creepy turn. Bloomberg is now reporting the following:

An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.

The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. 

And:

Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.

Well that’s delightful. Actually it’s not. And even though this information doesn’t appear to have been used for anything nefarious, the fact that this team has access to this data is problematic if you’re the privacy minded sort.

Now if you’re the least bit bothered by this…. And you should be bothered by this… Amazon has this handy page that will allow you to tweak your privacy settings so that you only allow Amazon to hear and see the information that you want them to see. I would suggest that all Alexa owners give this page a read and act accordingly.

A report from Bloomberg has revealed that whatever you say to your Amazon Alexa have potentially been heard by thousands of Amazon employees. The report explains that the company has staff around the world, both full time and contract, whose job it is to listen to people’s interactions with the Echo devices and use that to improve how Alexa responds in future.

Now this shouldn’t come as a shock seeing as Amazon keeps what you say to Alexa on file so that they can hand it over to the cops if they show up with a warrant for example. But at the same time it is a bit of a problem seeing as I really don’t want any of these smart speakers to be collecting my conversations and having the companies behind them listen to what I say.

Now if any of this sounds familiar, it should. You might remember the story I wrote on Amazon owned Ring employees watching customer camera feeds. At the time Amazon had this to say:

We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously. In order to improve our service, we view and annotate certain Ring videos. These videos are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes

And in the present day in terms of this fiasco, Amazon had this to say:

“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman said in an emailed statement. “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”

You’ll excuse me if that doesn’t make me feel better. Which means that an Alexa device will never see the light of day in my home. In the meantime, I’ll go back to using Siri. Sure it isn’t as smart as the other smart assistants out there. But at least Apple’s privacy policy makes it clear how your information is used, the fact that it isn’t directly tied to you, that much of it resides on your iDevices, and you can reset things so that you can cover your tracks if you need to. All of that makes me feel better.

This is a total #Fail.

According to KIRO 7, a family from Portland suddenly received a phone call from a person on their contact list telling them to “Unplug your Alexa devices right now, You’re being hacked.” This person, who was an employee of the husband, stated that he had received audio recordings of conversations that took place in the family’s home. He was able to prove this by telling the family what they had just been talking about. Here’s the scary part. When the family reached out to Amazon, they were able to confirm that this happened.

Scary.

Now the article lacks details about how this happened. But if I were to make a guess, I would say that since this thing is always listening to you, it likely heard and misinterpreted something that made it send the conversation to the third party. But that’s just a guess. Amazon would really do the world a favor by describing what happened and how it will stop this from happening again in the future.

Well, they sort of did that:

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.

The problem is that the device would have said something if that were true to confirm the intent of the people who were speaking. Thus unless these people were clueless, there’s is no way they would have not noticed this. Amazon needs to come up with a better answer than this.

As an aside, could this happen with other smart home speakers? Inquiring minds want to know.

Amazon is introducing the Echo Dot Kids Edition, a child-focused version of its Echo smart speaker. It’s just like the Echo Dot that you can get now, but it’s aimed at kids. You can turn off the ability to buy stuff. You can force your kids to use words like “please” and “thank you” when interacting with it. Parents choose which services and skills kids can use, and gives them the ability to set a bedtime or block off time for homework, so that kids can’t talk with Alexa when they’re supposed to be sleeping or focusing on other things. And it will serve up age-appropriate content.

But is this a good idea?

I wonder that because I’ve watched four year olds have delightful conversations with Google Assistant and Siri. But these same kids are shy reserved when dealing with people in real life. I also wonder what Amazon is going to do with all the data that they collect on kids that use this gizmo? That’s not a trivial thought given the Facebook data leakage scandal. There’s also the cynical side of me who thinks that this is a great way to get these kids hooked on Amazon services while they’re young.

Then there’s the fact that I have to ask if kids really need to have one of these at all? What is it that kids get out of having a virtual assistant? Will they suffer by not having one? I don’t think so. This seems to be a solution looking for a problem. Thus if I were a parent, I’d be giving this gizmo a pass. Perhaps other parents should do the same and instead do things like send their kids outside to play or read them a book.

Just a thought.

From the “you can’t make this stuff up department” comes the news that users who own Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange laughter coming from the device without having interacted with it first. Here’s what The Verge had to say:

Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

As noted in media reports and a trending Twitter moment, Alexa laughs without being prompted to wake. People on Twitter and Reddit reported that they thought it was an actual person laughing near them, which can be scary when you’re home alone. Many responded to the cackling sounds by unplugging their Alexa-enabled devices.

In case you’re wondering what it sounds like, here is an example:

https://twitter.com/CaptHandlebar/status/966838302224666624

Very creepy if you ask me. As if our AI overlords are plotting against us humans. Hopefully Amazon fixes this before they exterminate us.

🙂

Last week, Amazon announced the 20 cities that made the cut in terms of where the company will build its second headquarters, otherwise known as HQ2. Toronto and the larger Greater Toronto Area made the cut. A lot of people are happy about that as Toronto was the only non-US city to make the cut.

I on the other hand think this is a really bad development. Why? There’s two big reasons:

1. Amazon is looking for talent and will scoop up all the talent that exists here to power its own business. This will be at the expense of startups here in Toronto who will likely be in no position to compete due to the deep pockets that Amazon has. That means the next BlackBerry will never see the light of day because the talent needed to take it to the next level will work for Amazon and the results of that knowledge and hard work will generate lots of revenue for an American company. We should be saying no to having such a large company come in and scoop up that talent. Instead we should be doing everything possible to encourage that talent to drive revenue for Canadian companies. That way Canadians can be the innovators of the future.
2. Toronto is not a US city. Which means that if Amazon were to pick Toronto, it would be subject to a angry Tweetstorm from a certain President Donald J. Trump who is well known for his “America First” mantra. So one wonders if Jeff Bezos and company are truly willing to take that fight on. Maybe they are? Who knows? But the flipside to that is that the Trump administration already has Canada in its crosshairs over NAFTA. Thus we should likely be circling the wagons rather than inviting trouble on yet another front.

For those reasons, I am not a supporter of HQ2. Let an American city score it. That way the politicians here in the Greater Toronto area can get back to doing things that will benefit the people who live here. Such as building better transit, improving infrastructure, and driving the innovation economy by helping to build great Canadian companies that the world, which is everyone outside the United States, will want to do business with. If that happens, it will be irrelevant what Amazon does. And it will be another made in Canada success story to go with ones like the 56k modem, the Canadarm, Sonar, insulin, and the Cardiac pacemaker just to name some great Canadian inventions.

The question is, will those politicians see that or are they too focused on the short term gain of Amazon setting up shop in Toronto to see the big picture?