Posted on 10/29/2023 6:37:52 AM PDT by devane617
Smart speakers offer amazing convenience—from playing your favorite tunes to re-ordering toilet paper—with only a simple voice command. But that convenience can come with a steep cost in privacy that many consumers aren't even aware they're paying.
We've all had the uncanny experience of searching for something on the internet and then suddenly ads for that very thing are popping up everywhere we look online. It's no coincidence, said Umar Iqbal, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
"My collaborators and I uncovered that Amazon uses smart speaker interaction data to infer user interests and then uses those interests to target personalized ads to the user," Iqbal said. "That's something that Amazon was not upfront about before our research."
The team presented its work Oct. 26 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal, where they received the best paper award. They aim to provide visibility into what information is captured by smart speakers, how it is shared with other parties and how it is used by such parties, allowing consumers to better understand the privacy risks of these devices and the impact of data sharing on people's online experiences.
(Excerpt) Read more at techxplore.com ...
Yup.
Alexa is just the tip of the iceberg, of eavesdropping in on your day.
When my computer screen started popping up screens remind l Mrs. Jackson that she's the one who went bra shopping.
I bore Alexa to death.
1984 comes via the intersection of the Tech Oligarchs and advertising capitalism.
Your cellphone does the same thing.
Alexa has a market for people who bore her to death...
I watch a lot of old movies, and Umar Iqbal sounds like a character name that Groucho Marx or WC Fields would come up with. Not to mention the title that goes along with the name. I wonder if all of that could fit on one side of a standard business card.
Are these real people, or inventions of some mad scientist who lives in his mother's basement and wishes he was actually Captain Kirk or Spiderman?
:-)
Hopefully, by NOT talking to her/giving her anything to listen to. Versus, the opposite. 😂
Big Bro is.......Jeff!
“”I bore Alexa to death.””
Same here - I don’t have any smart devices in my house (not even this writer) and if I did, all they’d hear would be me SINGING....LOUDLY!!!!
I tried my Alexa just now.
Me: Is Joe Biden a good president?
Alexa: Joe Biden has a job approval rating of 40.7%.
It’s nice to see that Alexa is not covering for Mr. Potato Head, and is instead just reporting the facts.
Then:
Me: Alexa, is Joe Biden stupid?
Alexa: (silence, no answer)
That was a little disappointing.
No smart phone? Computer?
And every time we go out we’re caught on cameras an average of 27 times.
Civil rights died the day algore invented the interweb.
We might as well adopt the royal wave while venturing outside.
What about processing things overheard without an “interaction”.
I remember back in the early days of the Internet when my then teenage daughters had access to the family computer, reading email solicitations, becoming bewildered, and asking no one in particular, “Who are these people, and why do they think that I want larger breasts?”
My Alexa has to tolerate my self-taught piano playing. Alexa may be in therapy for years.
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