Posted on 04/14/2019 11:07:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
The worst fears of privacy advocates were confirmed this week after a Bloomberg report noted that Amazon employs thousands of specialists to decipher private conversations picked up on different types of Echo speakers. Of course, these devices use an automated assistant named “Alexa” to respond to requests for information, to play music, to turn off the lights and perform countless other tasks. All of this interaction with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) device is supposed to make life easier, not allow for a sophisticated spying operation.
This bombshell news should alarm every one of the millions of Echo users worldwide. In a quest for convenience and to achieve a “smart” home, customers have sacrificed a tremendous amount of privacy. Intimate details of family life, embarrassing conversations, spousal arguments or complaints about a boss or co-worker should remain private and not be heard by a nameless Amazon employee in a listening center thousands of miles away from home.
What about political opinions? If people are concerned about potential retaliation for controversial views and want to keep those beliefs confidential and not be heard outside the confines of their home, they should not plant a listening device named Alexa in their living room.
Potentially, in the not too distant future, in a country where citizens are not guaranteed constitutional rights, a person’s private political beliefs may be discovered, and it may be determined to be unacceptable to government authorities. For example, supporters of candidates opposed to the political establishment or the “Deep State” may be harassed or even imprisoned.
The Orwellian implications of this news cannot be overstated. According to the Bloomberg article, Amazon employs their expert listeners in unmarked buildings located in both the United States and in foreign countries such as Romania and Costa Rica. Obviously, Amazon has tried to keep this activity secret. If it wanted to advertise these controversial practices, their listening centers would have been adorned with Amazon signage and customers would have been alerted that their conversations may be recorded. Instead, it has been a big secret, until now.
While Amazon claims that only a small percentage of customers are the victims of this vast spying operation, the true numbers are unknown. It seems that each professional listener spends nine hours a day monitoring up to 1,000 recordings. Thus, the scope of this operation is vast and should be a concern to every American who cares about privacy and is worried about the power of big corporations or even big government.
Amazon claims that it does not act against customers even if evidence of criminal misconduct is heard by their teams of professional eavesdroppers. These specialists are not allowed to contact police or any law enforcement authority no matter what information is heard. However, it is conceivable to envision a future when these recordings are regularly shared with government officials.
Currently, the conversations are recorded and transcribed by Amazon employees for one main purpose, to use the material gathered to improve the capabilities of the Echo speakers. According to an Amazon representative, “this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding system, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.”
This rationale is ludicrous as a system that records and transcribes private conversations does not work “well for everyone.” According to a Daily Mail report, the Echo devices are so sensitive that Amazon employees are able to hear when customers are singing in the shower or when they are engaged in very confidential conversations.
Hopefully, this potential disaster will be addressed by the United States Congress and political leaders from all over the world. While Amazon has every right to improve the capabilities of their devices, they should have no right to spy on customers and record their conversations. It is 2019, but if we don’t act, it will become 1984, an Orwellian nightmare where Big Brother reigns supreme.
Perhaps the users can initiate a mis-information campaign that will overwhelm the system?
I received an Echo as a give. I threw it away!
Alexa! Quit hitting your brother!
As I have posted in other threads we have half a dozen of them spread between houses. The echo and periphery devices are inexpensive can be very useful. This article was meant not to inform but to stir ignorant people up.
I saw this coming.
I would not have one.
Did you read any of the reader’s comments? I wouln’t want one of those things. You can have ‘em all if they make you happy.
Smart move. That’s what I would do too.
Guns. This will be the primary device to find out who owns guns, number, and type.
Neither would I.
The hysteria is hysterical.
That's just my opinion.
Interesting since most people want a Catholic priest to break the sanctity of the confessional and tell police about a child having been molested.
Not tech employees though, they're doing God's work and should never do anything that would threaten sales of the product.
Will Amazon be charged for this, or are they too big to prosecute?
It's easy to conceive of a government that will make it mandatory, for all the right reasons, of course. Instant surveillance state.
Still, it should come as little surprise that a device you've bought and configured to respond to your voice does what it's designed to do. Google logs your search histories (in theory this is deletable). Amazon logs your purchase histories, and so does your credit card company. A warrant is all that stands between that data and anybody empowered to obtain one, and that, as we now know with the FISA scandal, is eminently corruptible.
I don't think you can keep yourself completely immune from any of this if you still want to avail yourself of the tremendous power and convenience of participating. I do think you can minimize that risk. That takes work, though, sometimes a lot of it. Still, I'd like to think that some common sense will prevail, and that a SWAT team won't be automatically dispatched to my home if I should leave the volume up too loud on The Godfather.
All they had to do was to pay attention:
Ecclesiastes 10:20 kjvCurse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber:
for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Slick! A Cloward-Piven Strategy for Alexia, Echo, "Smart" TVs, etc. I like it!
Any FReeper who has one of these devices in their home is just asking for trouble, IMHO.
Thank you for the well needed reassurance that nothing nefarious will ever happen.
I have at least 7.37 minutes of advance warning of incoming.
Alexia, et al are the Telescreens straight from Orwell’s brilliant 1984. Bad news then, bad news now.
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