That’s part of the consideration. If they save 1 million a year and lose 2 million in sales, they won’t do it; if they save 1 million a year and lose 900k in sales, they probably would. Of course, that’s what regulations and the FDA are for.
By that same token, Amazon certainly DOES care about their public image, and losing “goodwill” would hurt their bottom line. When weighing whether to listen in to everyone or not, that would be a consideration, if listening to everyone was at all practical.
It’s just as practical as remembering your web history. If Alexa/Siri were to note a certain word/subject kept coming up in your private conversations why not toss it on your consumer profile? This doesn’t require listening to everything, just logging non-common words.
Eta: I’m not suggesting this is happening just that it’s no different practically than Facebook watching your content and selecting things for you. Or Google logging your search terms. Morally, different of course.
The point is that Amazon doesn’t have the processing power to dedicate to analyzing all the speech coming from all the Alexa devices at all times. How are they meant to “log non-common words” without listening at all times?
Your phone has the processing power. The Alexa app uses its normal speech to text ability to detect unusual words and builds a small file to note their frequency. At a certain threshold it sends off a word to your consumer profile.
It would be possible to build devices to do this. Do you have any evidence that this was done? Because Amazon and Google claim it was not, and 3rd party tests have shown no evidence for it.
It would be trivial to make this happen and loads of ways to hide such a file from casual users. No, I don’t have any evidence this has happened and explicitly not suggesting it happened. It’s certainly practical though.
Absence of evidence is evidence of a cover-up, in other words. Got it.
Uhh, no you don’t get it. My point was you don’t need to upload everyone’s conversations up to Amazon’s neuronetwork to monitor conversations. That would indeed be impractical as you said.
Eta: I don’t think this happening and don’t think it’s hideable from computer nerd slueths!
I don’t think this is remotely true. I don’t think it’s at all trivial nor practical to do this. Again, tracking cookies are easy, putting together a system like MYSTIC on consumer devices is a huge deal both technically and legally.
If Alexa was running in the background, wouldn’t it just be a matter doing what it does when it’s “activated” simply minus the responses to you?
So right off the bat, this would maybe work for your phone or computer, but not your Amazon Echo or Google Hub.
So, could you dedicate some portion of every phone’s processing power to listen in to all conversations and create a file of unusual words? Possibly. It would cause a performance drain on the phone, and on its battery life. Maybe you could hide this from the casual user, but not from professionals who review the phone, or who develop software from it, or who jailbreak it.
Not to mention, these devices are subject to regulation, and I’m sure that the regulatory bodies in countries around the world would all be capable of finding this sort of thing very easily.
No, because what Alexa does when it runs is stream your voice file to a central server to be analyzed. You are saying they’ll run a voice recognition program right there on the phone to look for key words.
Ok but what I suggested required almost no analysis. You have speech to text. You run each word against a discard list (extremely common or uninteresting) and only log the word if there’s no match. After the word is logged x times, send to profile.
No, because we’re not talking about a system where Alexa is listening for and responding to a list of pre-determined commands and acting on them. You’re talking about a system where a device is passively listening to ambient sounds, picking out keywords somehow, and keeping track of those to try to predict your habits and likes, and then tailoring content to you. A situation where you are talking to your doctor about colon health during a consultation, Alexa is listening from the phone in your pocket, and now your phone is suggesting products that promote colon health.
That’s the sort of thing that people are worried about, and I think it’s pretty much science fiction. A Black Mirror sort of paranoia.
Now if you just mean, you’ve asked Alexa to order you Tide Pods from Amazon once a month for 3 months and now you get suggestions for Tide Pods, it does do that, but that’s again just routine stuff you’d expect it to do. That’s just a tracking cookie sort of thing. That isn’t intrusive or creepy or something that would concern the average consumer (if anything it’s a convenience). We’re talking about real intrusive, creepy stuff which would be difficult to do and would be much more harm than good (especially to Amazon) even if it was feasible.
Speech to text requires a lot of analysis and is exactly what Alexa runs remotely on the Cloud. The remainder is just running a text search and takes very little processing power.
From Amazon’s FAQ about Automated Speech Recognition:
My phone does speech to text excellently in real time. Not even an add on. The built in part of the standard keyboard.
Again, I don’t expect the analysis to happen at phone level. Just sending keywords to central.
If you’re interested in how Alexa and similar software actually works, @Atamasama and I have provided some info, backed up by sources. Otherwise, you’re certainly free to continue with baseless speculation.
Eta: and if it is your conjecture that your phone could do text to speech while doing everything else it does with no hit to performance that could be noticed by even professionals, I don’t really know what to tell you. It just would not be possible to keep this a secret.
Lol, I’m not talking about how Alexa works. I’m saying a very simple program could monitor for keywords in conversations. Such a simple program could easily be placed in something like Alexa. I also said it would be hard to hide from a smart person looking for it. So yeah. Done.
By the way, @FigNorton I do get that you don’t think this is happening, I hope you don’t get the impression that I’m trying to convince you that Alexa doesn’t do that. I know I don’t have to do that, you’ve made it clear that you understand. My point is that it also isn’t as easy to do as you’ve suggested.