Alexa, are you Listening?
Would you let strangers spy in your home and keep your conversations and your recordings? Smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home, provide advantage and convenience through their integrated voice assistants, but also raise privacy worries due to their continuously listening microphones. A large number of speaker’s owners don’t know or realize that amazon retains a copy of the whole conversation after it hears its name. Keeping speaker owner’s recordings help to train company artificial intelligence. Smart speakers detect and recognize the voice commands and instructions which offer users hands-free voice control and the speaker’s microphones have to continuously listen for their wake word (e.g., “Alexa”). A case study has been conducted by Lau, J., Zimmerman, B. and Schaub, F. (2018) with smart speaker users and non-users to investigate the factors of non-adopting smart speakers, and to examine individuals privacy concerns and perceptions about smart speakers, and if these concerns affect their behavior around and with smart speakers.
The case study results found out that non-users abstain from acquiring smart speakers due to concerns regarding privacy, lack of utility, and lack of trust in speaker companies. On the other hand, smart speaker users express few privacy concerns, however, the study finds out that their justifications show an incomplete understanding of privacy risks such as believing that it would not be practical or feasible for the companies to collect and store recordings. Moreover, users consider trust in speaker companies is necessary in order to use the speakers and to protect their privacy. In addition, the users relate that protecting privacy would be in the company’s best interest. The study shows that many users rarely use speaker’s privacy controls, like audio logs and the mute button which express different levels of awareness that’s required for privacy-convenience trade-off, indicating that those controls do not meet user’s needs (Lau, J., Zimmerman, B., and Schaub, F., 2018).
In my opinion, smart speakers are finding their way into more and more homes and they offer hands-free convenience that’s supported by smart voice assistants that control smart devices. My recommendation to use Alexa or any other smart speaker and still keep your privacy is to check Alexa privacy screen and enable or disable the option “Manage how your data improves Alexa”. This option shows how Amazon creates new Alexa features by using your voice recordings, when this setting is enabled, your voice recordings may be used in the development of new features. It’s known that convenience comes at a cost, but you can be proactive by turning off the voice input and use Alexa remote instead and to disable your smartphone’s address book sharing feature. Furthermore, smart speaker owners can review and delete the interactions with Alexa. Although smart speakers are to ease the day-to-day thousands of ways, the end-user still needs to put in a little effort to ensure information privacy and security behaviors.
Lau, J., Zimmerman, B., and Schaub, F., 2018. Alexa, are you listening? privacy perceptions, concerns, and privacy-seeking behaviors with smart speakers. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), pp.1–31.
