12
votes
Amazon's explanation for why Alexa recorded a couple's private conversation and sent it to an acquaintance
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- Title
- Here's Amazon's explanation for the Alexa eavesdropping scandal
- Published
- May 24 2018
- Word count
- 282 words
I would tend to agree. I have Google Home, which has its own issues, but if it doesn't understand you or isn't completely certain it'll reply with something along the lines of "I don't know how to help with that" or "I'm not able to do that yet" or simply "I'm sorry I didn't catch that."
Another thing I think it's particularly good at is telling when it heard the tv and thought it was a cute, but quickly just turns off. True privacy with these speakers is of course nigh impossible, but at least GHome seems to be doing a better job of knowing when it's me saying something to it vs not.
Alexa does exactly the same thing. It's mostly just a threshold setting - and when you want your device to be able to pick up the voice of someone 20 feet away, around the corner, talking the other direction in a normal voice (which it can do), then you push up the risk of accidental confirmations.
I think that this is a freak occurrence being blown a bit out of proportion with use of words like "eavesdropping." There's enough incorrect information passed around about Alexa recording all audio and sending it to the cloud (it doesn't, and physically can't).
A lot of people seem to have trouble understand basic probability, too. You have so many of these devices running all the time in close proximity to you listening to all kinds of sounds over a long period of time, and the tech still isn't all that mature yet. What are the odds that it's not going to bug out every now and then?
That's fair, I believe them when they say its an edge case that is rather unlikely to happen. I guess I was just more mentioning that I've noticed my device always err (sometimes frustratingly far) on the side of "can't understand sound, try again." And I agree, there's plenty of people who don't take the time to learn what the device actually can and can't do.