Always On Listening Devices Another Step To The End Of Privacy

Smart home devices such as Amazon's Echo and Google's Smart Home offer a level of convenience that could only be found in science fiction a decade ago. Freed from screens and keyboards, millions have begun to interact by voice with smart home assistants, now integrated into homes in much the same way they would a human assistant.

Imagine for a moment that Amazon's integrated doorbells and door locks admit you to your home where you tell Nest what temperature you would like the air to be. As you walk from the foyer into the kitchen and the lights come on automatically, you direct the Amazon Echo to play your favorite song. 

While you start to make a cup of coffee, you ask Alexa to check your email and it reports that you have a new missive from your best friend. Realizing that you are running low on coffee beans, you say, "Alexa, order five pounds of coffee beans".  The system charges your credit card and the coffee arrives in two days. Your friend wants to meet up later. "Alexa, call Nathan," you say to the empty room and the sound of dialing follows as the music softens. 

You relax into your favorite chair as Nathan answers, lifting your feet to allow the robot vacuum cleaner to pass. Turns out he wants to see a movie tomorrow night. "Alexa, find review for Incredibles 2" you say into the air and seconds later you have average review scores and critical opinions of the film, as well as show times at the local theater, "Alexa, buy two tickets for the six o'clock showing of Incredibles 2."

All of this convenience, however, comes at a price: an unprecedented loss of privacy and personal home security. These smart home systems are, by necessity, always on and always listening. When they hear the trigger word, the name Alexa by default for Amazon's Echo, they begin recording, sending the audio to Amazon's servers and analyzing that conversation for its content and intent. When this goes as planned, you have knowingly surrendered audio recordings from your home to Amazon, but when it goes wrong the consequences are much worse.

In May of 2018, a Portland family made headlines when they learned that their Amazon Echo device had not only been recording their conversations without their knowledge but sending those audio clips to a random person from their contact list. 

Amazon acknowledged the incident and said that it wasn't the result of a hack, but instead the device had been triggered by a word in the conversation that sounded like "Alexa". Another snippet of private conversation was interpreted as a command to record and send and finally mistook another phrase for the name from the contact list.

"I felt invaded," the woman said, "A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, "I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.'" But millions more people are plugging in and despite such inevitable breaches of trust.

With smart home systems that record conversations, unlock our doors, access our payment accounts, send emails in our names, video record us to provide AI-driven fashion advice (an Amazon proposal) there is virtually nothing left that they do not control.

 

And these are no longer specialty gadgets only for the most tech savvy early adopters. US sales of smart speakers, such as the Google Home or the Amazon Echo, were around 7 million in 2016, then rose to 25 million in 2017.  They are predicted to hit 39 million units in 2018 and then peak at 40 million systems by 2019.

The largest home builder in the United States, Lennar, announced in early 2018 that it will be building Amazon smart control systems into all its new homes as a standard feature. These Amazon Echo systems will be linked to doorbells, smart locks, thermostats, lights and, of course, the always-listening digital assistants. Each house will come complete with two Alexa-enabled smart speakers, an Echo Show (for video) and an Echo Dot (a smaller speaker/microphone) as well as free installation from an Amazon technician. 

Touting the new trend toward smart homes as the next major wave in home design, Lennar believes that such systems will be as common in new homes as garages are now. "This will be the hallmark of why we buy a new home," David Kaiserman, President of Lennar recently told reporters, "It's an important step in the mass adoption of all these technologies."

Security experts advise users to change their activation phrases, maintain a separate (and protected) wi-fi network for their devices and either disable purchasing through the devices or implement a four-factor verbal confirmation code. All of this will help prevent accidental purchases and abuse by neighbors, burglars or amateur hackers. But no system is truly safe from hackers, as evidenced by the major security scandals involving billion-dollar banks, retailers and credit bureaus. 

Models sold before 2017 have already been hacked by security researchers through a vulnerability that provided the thieves with total control and access to the user's accounts. But even if your private conversations are not compromised by hackers, privacy laws allow for the US government to seize those recordings from Amazon or Google with ease.

The laws protecting individual privacy fade away when we have already provided recordings to a third party, Amazon or Google in this case, and these corporations have no legal standing to resist data collection requests from the US government. Essentially, anything recorded and sent to Google should be considered open to federal agents, no warrant from a judge needed.

In 2016 a man named James Bates of Arkansas was arrested based on evidence collected by an Amazon Echo device and a smart water meter, and this case surely won't be the last. Installed in hotel rooms across the country as well, you may not even have to buy your own to enjoy the deep and pervasive invasion of privacy that these smart systems offer.

Obvious comparisons to George Orwell's 1984 have become trite by now, but in the next five years we will actually be living in a world where the majority of homes contain an always-on listening device open to corporate power and the government, often a video recording system as well. 

Everything we own can be controlled by artificial intelligence systems. Privacy is barely hanging on by its fingernails and it is no exaggeration to say that our children may not even grasp the concept of privacy at all, growing up in a world everywhere exposed to the eyes of corporate power and the government.