There is no data for the police to have, because beyond requests, there is no data.
Unless someone knows more about this than Amazon is telling us?
Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year.
So if you then assume 5m Alexa's are active at any given point in time that works out to 380k PB. Ok, that doesn't work yet.
However, if you then layer on a flagging system, where only certain users' full record is stored, or only "suspicious incidents" are stored, and you get this down to only flagging 0.1% of all data, you arrive at 380PB of storage.
Amazon Glacier costs about $88.000 a year per PB, but there's a profit margin included in that, so I'll assume it costs Amazon just $75k a year.
In conclusion, it would cost Amazon about $28.5m a year to run such a system. That's certainly within the realm of possibility and of what LE/SIGINT clients would pay; I assume the NSA would gladly pay that sum x100 for that capability. Sounds like it'd be booming business for Amazon.
It is also the case that a consumer level service like glacier presumably has more redundancy than what might be needed for best-effort storage of these recordings, where losing any fraction of them wouldn't really be a problem.
I've chosen to err on the side of estimating it to be more expensive, because I think that makes the end result more convincing:
30m is chump change for parties like Amazon, and in reality it'll cost significantly less. 1m might well do. Maybe it's less still. You could combine flagging users with flagging low-certainty or keyword-containing transcriptions.
Either way, you don't need collusion with intelligence parties, just an unscrupulous or naive exac at Amazon that thinks the data might be worth a lot for training future learning models. Of course the more sinister but legal reselling to government agencies is a financially attractive option as well.
1200 bits per second is almost enough for toll-quality speech -- and I'm referring to the state of the art a few years ago. Speech codecs are probably better now. But let's stick with 1200 bps. That's enough to store continuous speech in the vicinity of the device for a year, using only about 5 GB.
My guess is that if you cared only about intelligibility and not fidelity, you could do the job with 10%-20% of that space.
So yes: Alexa could easily be collecting and storing a vast amount of data that isn't immediately transmitted or used.
What about abduction cases, inside trading, tax fraud, drug and human smuggling? There it could help to have data from months ago, so any newly discovered targets instantly come with a bunch of evidence.
"Get BGP+IPv6+IPv4 for $0.25/Mbps!"
I thought it was HE, but it must have been someone else that had a 10Gig deal for $2,000. Either way, that's for a single 10Gig link. If you're buying 100Gb - 1Tbps like Amazon is, you're probably getting an even better deal.
We just signed a contract with Level 3 for slightly more than the price you mentioned, but they had to build into us; which costs them ~$120k out of pocket, thus the higher price.
Depends, first of all storing compressed audio isn't that space-expensive, especially in some long term data storage like s3. Additionally they could only be storing the transcriptions, but not the voice behind them, which would be a lot less data.
We don't know as Amazon hasn't been very forthcoming about the privacy aspects of Alexa. I personally suspect they are keeping some voice information so they can use it to improve their NLP. I hope they are doing so in a way that is detached from accounts / IDs, but you never know.
Additionally, you can indeed delete a record of the query from the app, but who knows if the voice data or even the query itself is still stored after deletion, just not visible to us end users.
Almost definitely yes. I've never known a tech company that truly deletes anything
Sometimes deleted stuff is archived offline or in slow warehouse databases that are not live, etc.
Basically, Facebook's always-on audio listening on their mobile app (Messenger I believe, but might be both these days) was giving this data. I can't remember the name of the company, but here is another tech company doing the same:
> Symphony uses just one: an app, downloaded to the cellphones of its more than 15,000 panelists. Audio recognition software then picks up whatever people are tuning into, wherever they’re tuning into it: their TV sets, their laptops, or their smartphones. “[It] measures everything you want to measure from one approach,” says Bill Harvey, a media research consultant who’s worked with Symphony
https://theringer.com/tv-ratings-streaming-nielsen-symphony-...
[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code...
Would it be possible to test this? Check the battery life of the Dot in a completely silent room vs the battery life of a Dot listening to an audiobook played on repeat. If it is actually listening and transcribing it should have a higher power consumption and thus die faster - right?
Questions for anyone in the field: how much is preserved? Is there a < audio but > text form that allows for iterative testing? Maybe the output of a first-pass pheneme decoder? If so, what kind of space requirements?
Speaking of which I wonder what the net traffic usage of the Echo is?
People only speak a few hours per day and "interesting" conversations could be sampled from time to time and some Alexa stations flagged for full upload, if they want to know.
Average man uses 15,669 words/day, woman uses 16,215. Let's say average household has two people and half those words are spoken at home, 31,884/2 = 15,942. Let's say 8 bytes per word on average, just under 128k/day. That's a little under 47 MB/year. Not too expensive.
Edited with better source/numbers.
Edit: Done
About $2.55 / year [0][1][2], or, storing in AWS S3 "Infrequent access storage", about $180 after 5 years of recording [3][4].
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00684XVFS/
[1]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings#Recommended_...
[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.027+USD%2FGB+*+24+Kb...
[3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
[4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1%2F2)*(0.0125+USD%2F...
I could imagine some sort of log data being used to refute an alibi but what is implied by what is missing from the article, that it could be used as an after the fact witness, is not really feasible.
Actually it would be less than 60 GB per device per year for 24 hour recording at 15 kilobits per second CBR. This includes all silent hours.
My guess would be less than 5 GB per device per year to record all spoken words.
Maybe it also wakes on "bomb" and "infidel".