Diabolical_Dos
Unverified Legion of Trill member
In Smart House, the 1999 classic DCOM (that’s Disney Channel Original Movie for non-millennials), a teenage boy wins a state-of-the-art modern home for his family, fully outfitted with an artificially intelligent smart assistant that has coffee ready for when they wake, cleans the floor after a party, keeps the family dog occupied and even plays music based on mood.
Eighteen years later, that science-fiction ‘90s tale has turned into reality (minus, of course, the Smart House assistant’s level of self-awareness and dubious attempt to hold the family hostage). But the general trajectory -- an AI-powered home assistant that learns more about you and your preferences over time -- is precisely the point of products such as Amazon Echo or Google Home. And although experts say we’re still far from even the possibility of AI on par with human consciousness, there’s a different -- albeit less traditionally frightening -- aspect of this tech. That’s the idea that what it hears could, in some extreme cases, be used against you.
There was, for instance, the widely reported 2015 case where Amazon Echo data was sought in a murder investigation. Prosecutors believed Amazon may have recordings that could shed light on the events that led to police finding a man dead in an Arkansas man’s hot tub. The defendant later voluntarily handed over the recordings, and charges were dropped in 2017 due to a lack of evidence. Theoretically, the government can request evidence from a smart home device in any criminal investigation -- arson, auto theft, larceny and more. It’s especially true when it comes to placing someone in any given location, whether to corroborate or disprove an alibi. If you say you weren’t at home one evening, but stored recordings suggest you were in your living room telling Alexa to “please order pizza,” you’ll likely have some questions to answer.
“That’s pretty damning evidence right there,” said Richard Forno, an affiliate of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS).
If smart home devices are “always listening,” as many might think, why couldn’t the recordings provide any clarity in the 2015 murder case? To answer that question, it’s important to take a close look at the inner workings of these devices. The idea that they’re “always listening” is only somewhat true. When switched on, smart home assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home default to “passive listening mode” -- meaning they record at seconds-long intervals and parse the sounds they hear in a process called “device keyword spotting.” Tech companies say the devices only begin recording when they hear their “wake word” (such as “Alexa” or “Okay Google”) -- otherwise, they’ll consistently overwrite and discard each fraction of sound they recorded, never sending any of it to the cloud.
There have, of course, been glitches and errors in this practice. In May, an Amazon Echo owned by a couple in Seattle recorded an in-home conversation, then sent it to the phone of an individual from their contact list. In a statement to Recode, Amazon pointed to the incident as a fluke, saying the device woke up to a word sounding like “Alexa,” then interpreted background conversation as a “send message” request to a specific individual. Regardless, the company said it was working to avoid similar strings of events in the future.
The good news: Besides unplugging the device, there are other ways to switch off passive listening mode. Amazon Echo, for example, offers a “mute” button that signals the device to stop listening for a wake word, and that mode is denoted by a red ring of light. Inside each device, there’s a single wire that powers either the microphone or the red light -- and when the red light is on, there’s a physical protection against the microphone being active.
The reason experts say these features are largely effective? It’s not just a software protection (which, due to the malleability of computer code, could theoretically be tampered with or hacked more easily). Instead, it’s a “much more robust” hardware protection, said John Verdi, vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). The physical feature built into the device -- the ability to either power the red light or the microphone, but not both -- would likely require physical tampering and couldn’t be done via a remote software hack. That’s why it’s important to take note of any smart device’s hardware protections as well as its software security.
Eighteen years later, that science-fiction ‘90s tale has turned into reality (minus, of course, the Smart House assistant’s level of self-awareness and dubious attempt to hold the family hostage). But the general trajectory -- an AI-powered home assistant that learns more about you and your preferences over time -- is precisely the point of products such as Amazon Echo or Google Home. And although experts say we’re still far from even the possibility of AI on par with human consciousness, there’s a different -- albeit less traditionally frightening -- aspect of this tech. That’s the idea that what it hears could, in some extreme cases, be used against you.
There was, for instance, the widely reported 2015 case where Amazon Echo data was sought in a murder investigation. Prosecutors believed Amazon may have recordings that could shed light on the events that led to police finding a man dead in an Arkansas man’s hot tub. The defendant later voluntarily handed over the recordings, and charges were dropped in 2017 due to a lack of evidence. Theoretically, the government can request evidence from a smart home device in any criminal investigation -- arson, auto theft, larceny and more. It’s especially true when it comes to placing someone in any given location, whether to corroborate or disprove an alibi. If you say you weren’t at home one evening, but stored recordings suggest you were in your living room telling Alexa to “please order pizza,” you’ll likely have some questions to answer.
“That’s pretty damning evidence right there,” said Richard Forno, an affiliate of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS).
If smart home devices are “always listening,” as many might think, why couldn’t the recordings provide any clarity in the 2015 murder case? To answer that question, it’s important to take a close look at the inner workings of these devices. The idea that they’re “always listening” is only somewhat true. When switched on, smart home assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home default to “passive listening mode” -- meaning they record at seconds-long intervals and parse the sounds they hear in a process called “device keyword spotting.” Tech companies say the devices only begin recording when they hear their “wake word” (such as “Alexa” or “Okay Google”) -- otherwise, they’ll consistently overwrite and discard each fraction of sound they recorded, never sending any of it to the cloud.
There have, of course, been glitches and errors in this practice. In May, an Amazon Echo owned by a couple in Seattle recorded an in-home conversation, then sent it to the phone of an individual from their contact list. In a statement to Recode, Amazon pointed to the incident as a fluke, saying the device woke up to a word sounding like “Alexa,” then interpreted background conversation as a “send message” request to a specific individual. Regardless, the company said it was working to avoid similar strings of events in the future.
The good news: Besides unplugging the device, there are other ways to switch off passive listening mode. Amazon Echo, for example, offers a “mute” button that signals the device to stop listening for a wake word, and that mode is denoted by a red ring of light. Inside each device, there’s a single wire that powers either the microphone or the red light -- and when the red light is on, there’s a physical protection against the microphone being active.
The reason experts say these features are largely effective? It’s not just a software protection (which, due to the malleability of computer code, could theoretically be tampered with or hacked more easily). Instead, it’s a “much more robust” hardware protection, said John Verdi, vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). The physical feature built into the device -- the ability to either power the red light or the microphone, but not both -- would likely require physical tampering and couldn’t be done via a remote software hack. That’s why it’s important to take note of any smart device’s hardware protections as well as its software security.
