Smart Speakers

One new way that people are listening to a wide range of audio programs are the new smart speakers. These include Amazon's Echo devices, Google Home speakers, and Apple's HomePods. Although they each offer somewhat different services, they are all about delivering online services (including audio programing) by voice command. You can use them to answer a question, order a product, turn lights on or off, arm your alarm system, or play audio programming.49 While it might seem great to be able to just ask your speaker to start playing your favorite music or podcast, there are also some creepy aspects to these devices. To be able to respond to your commands, your smart speaker has to be always listening to you. And these speakers don't have the capability built in to respond to your commands. Instead, their software, be it Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri, have to talk to a central server to process your request. That means that Amazon, Google, or Apple is literally listening to everything that happens in your home. Now maybe you trust these companies with all your most private moments. But think about the implication of someone hacking these speakers and installing malware on them. Your smart speaker could then be used as a wiretap in your house. There would also be the possibility of a government security agency listening in. These may all sound like conspiracy theories, but they are all technically possible when you deliberately install an always-on listening device in your house.50

In fact, the companies that produce these devices do record and potentially listen to you to improve the quality of their speech recognition. Amazon, for example, employs thousands of people to listen to these recordings so they can transcribe them to improve the accuracy of Alexa's speech recognition. While most of what these transcribers hear is rather routineclarifying that the words "Taylor Swift" refer to a pop singerthey do occasionally hear children screaming or a sexual assault.51 Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler took on the task of listening to four years of what Alexa had recorded from his home. During his listening, Fowler heard,

"Spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of 'Downton Abbey.' There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal."

Fowler notes that consumers can go back to erase Alexa's recordings, but they cannot stop the recordings from being made in the first place. Apple's Siri records everything that it hears, but Apple says that the company attaches an anonymizing identifier to each recording. Only Google, with its Google Assistant, does not record everything by default.

For the first part, address: What are the criticisms of smart speakers? Why do some people consider them an invasion of privacy?

The second part, address: Do you or does someone you know have a smart speaker? Do you worry about them invading your privacy, and are they worth the convenience of having a voice command computer ready all the time?