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 ...
LOL! Well, I’m single and live alone, so she can hear me talking to myself, my bad piano playing, and my gripes about the price of food. Other than that, she has nothing.
Umar Iqbal? Where was he born? On another planet?
I have 2 large white boards in the kitchen...some things are never spoken
George Orwell never imagined that people would pay money for the privilege of bugging their own homes and carrying around tracking devices wherever they go.
I make you-know-who spout talk radio all day during the week.
No “smart speakers” in our house, but our cell phones, tablets and PCs are busy doing the same thing.
Our new refrigerator could listen to us if I connected it to our WiFi, which I am not about to do.
Civil rights died the day algore invented the interweb.
Yes, and things have only gotten worse since he created those diabolical “algore rhythms”!
Smart speakers? I always thought it was microphones that did the listening…
"She" is always listening -- how else is she going to hear her name when you ask something. "She" must always be listening.
Kim DuToit had a comment on these machines: "I won't have one of those "Stasi" listening devices in my home." I totally agree with him -- I do not, and will not, have one of those devices in my home.
My wife wants a new TV for the bedroom. I don’t think it’s possible now to get a new TV that isn’t a “smart” TV, i.e. one that watches and listens to you. Some say you can turn that stuff off, but I don’t believe it.
I’ll just have to try to disgust the watchers to death.
As long as you don’t connect the built-in video player to your router it would not be a problem.
You could just connect a PC to the HDMI input and use the PC as your video player.
Thanks.
Of course if the PC is connected to your router and has a microphone and video camera, it will be spying on you instead.
Alexa thinks I am studying meteorology.
;-)
Yes it does. You can’t keep the damn thing locked down. Talk about a product an in 8 hours you will be getting ads for it on a different device.
Right above the space where macro warnings and trusted warnings appear, I get a box hawking some new mobile product.
-PJ
Hilarious. I actually laughed out loud when I read that comment.
I just assume it is.
Have a radio AM or FM playing and rest your smartphone near the radio speaker. No more eavesdropping.
“”No smart phone? Computer?””
NO smart phone and yes, a computer. Are you telling me my computer listens to me?
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