Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege

https://threatpost.com/amazon-alexa-secretly-records-children/145708/

by gexos • 7 years ago

93 48 7 years ago

freehunter3• 7 years ago

Important to note that if this allegation is true, it means Alexa is recording everyone and storing it indefinitely, not just children. The lawsuit just says children because children have more privacy protections than adults so it's easier to win a case when children's rights are being violated.

devoply• 7 years ago

Did you read the article? That is not what the lawsuit is saying at all. And it would be pretty trivial to figure out if Alexa was recording all the time by putting a sniffer on your network and seeing how much data is being transmitted to the cloud when Alex is on vs. when Alexa is listening to you. Alexa on board does not have the tech to convert speech to text, it sends all the audio to the cloud for that.

freehunter3• 7 years ago

I think you misread my comment.

Johnny555• 7 years ago

I'm not sure you can call a documented feature of the product an "allegation". Its well known that Amazon saves voice recordings that the devices capture after the wake word.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/28/h...

Though I also don't see how Amazon is responsible when parents put a recording device like the Echo, a Nest Cam, a recording baby monitor, a Ring Doorbell, etc in the home and it ends up recording a child.

hunter2_• 7 years ago

Plastic bag packaging often says "keep away from children" and maybe privacy invasions should too. You might say there's a big difference in that one is life safety and the other isn't, but there's plenty of non-life-safety messaging applied to products such as "not for street use" on car mods affecting emissions in California. I mean I guess that's life safety at a macro level but then privacy invasions could be too. I think the car part manufacturer could be liable if they don't present a reasonable effort to keep the use of their products well contained.

davnicwil• 7 years ago

I completely agree with you that having an Alexa in your home means you must accept that your (i.e. you, the registered user) voice commands are being stored indefinitely.

But to be fair, there is a distinction here. That is, if you're not the registered Alexa user and you're not the one who agreed to the usage terms, shouldn't Amazon try to recognise that your voice is different and not store your voice commands? It's clear they have the recognition tech to do this. I'd say it's a pretty reasonable expectation.

Even if you posit that consent is implicit in using Alexa (i.e. if you use a friend's, for example, in making that choice you're consenting to Amazon storing your voice command) - something that's debatable but certainly within reason - I'd say you definitely can't extend this to children, who simply can't be expected to even know what this means let alone understand the implications.

freehunter3• 7 years ago

The allegation is that Amazon has the ability to differentiate from children vs adults, but still records children and saves the recordings indefinitely without the parents permission if a child says the word "Alexa". I call it an allegation because it's not entirely provable from outside of Amazon.

LMYahooTFY• 7 years ago

The critical question clearly seems to be what evidence do the plaintiffs have?

Presumably, the plaintiffs could at the least have records of various advertising that is uncannily targeting related subject matter to what the children may have been consuming and outputting, though I wonder how they could prove that the children didn't inadvertently activate Alexa and provide this data. Perhaps that is enough to subpoena Amazon?

It seems like the marketing industry will be at the front line of the battle over what age is enough to give your own consent in many aspects of life, and I personally am standing on the other side of that line.

I hear that some scandanavian regions have laws prohibiting adverters from targeting children, and I wonder how tech companies will deal with such restrictions.

roywiggins• 7 years ago

No, they're talking about the recordings made when people say the wake word. People, especially children, probably don't know that this recordings are stored indefinitely: “At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users that it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so.”

tmp2846• 7 years ago

Someone in my network who is in marketing at Alexa accidentally linked to one of these articles instead of an internal blog announcing a new feature for kids.

idlewords2• 7 years ago

It's an always-on Internet connected home microphone. What do people think it is doing?

mikeash2• 7 years ago

That description fits your cell phone too, except it’s “everywhere you go” rather than “home.” Do you expect it to record you?

idlewords2• 7 years ago

The cell phone is not voice activated. That said, I do expect the worst of it.

sergiotapia• 7 years ago

The celphone does in fact record you. I don't care what THEY say publicly.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

I mean, not secretly. Amazon is very explicit that it saves recordings of all commands for training and personalization -- you can even manually review and delete them, or disable them completely.

And obviously if you have your children speak to Alexa, it will record them too. Same with visitors in your home. It's not a secret... it's how it works.

Alexa does support voice profiles. But it's certainly not perfect -- voice identification can be hard even for people to do (depending on similarity), and there's a huge leap from distinguishing between pre-identified voices, versus determining if a voice is one of those and not one of billions of other people. And there's certainly no magic way to analyze a voice a determine that it's 12 (not allowed) or 13 (allowed).

So I'm not exactly sure what this lawsuit intends to change?

The only thing I can imagine is perhaps to allow disabling voice recordings per voice profile, so you can create a voice profile of your child and then do that -- but intriguingly, Amazon says voice profiles can only be created for users 13+, so there's presumably something legal here.

But really, if you don't want your kids (or visitors) using Alexa, either tell them not to use it, or don't have one in the first place. I really can't see how this is up to anyone other than the parents?

jsty• 7 years ago

"but intriguingly, Amazon says voice profiles can only be created for users 13+, so there's presumably something legal here"

Presumably if they're banned from storing and processing the information of under-13s, that includes doing so for the purposes of identifying that individual as under-13.

ronsor• 7 years ago

well then, that's simply an impossible condition (if you can't find out whether they're under 13, then you can't comply, and if you do try to find out, you aren't complying: there's no way out)

Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege

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