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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation?

It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.

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It's a great question. Reminds me of Uber and its new policy of monitoring location of customers few minutes after drop off "to improve service".

It is also true that if Alexa was listening in on conversations so as to have "social conversation context" for "improved processing of commands" ... well.

> What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation?

I would be very surprised if Amazon sends everything up to the cloud; it would be very expensive to do so. Looking for "Alexa" in the audio is done locally, and probably triggers recording then.

I don't think the expensive part is accurate. Voice sounds okay using the G.729 VOIP codec at 8kbps. Capturing and storing that amount of data, for every Echo user, 24 hrs a day would be trivial for company the size of Amazon.

As others have pointed out, network monitoring has shown the Echo only transmits after it's heard the wake-word, so it would appear Amazon doesn't capture everything.

Hypothetically, if I was tasked with recording everything, I'd just add an internal buffer and then ship chunks of that data along with the regular queries.

Indeed, yes, that'd be the way to do it. You could claim the post-wake-word data is recorded at a higher bit rate than it actually is, thereby accounting for the larger than necessary data-transfer.

I won't be surprised if we find out this is happening. They'll probably call it a "bug", fix it in an OTA, but then accidentally regress 6 months later.

I won't be surprised if we find out this is happening. They'll probably call it a "bug", fix it in an OTA, but then accidentally regress 6 months later.

I'd be very surprised if this is happening -- Amazon knows people are watching, and it would erode trust with customers if it's found out that they are spying.

I'd be much more concerned about whether or not my phone is spying on me, even if it says it's only listening if I say "Ok Google" or "Siri". It's much harder for me to see what traffic my phone is sending across the cellular network than to snoop Amazon Echo's wifi traffic. And phone malware (sometimes baked in by the manufacturer) is increasingly common. Since the Echo does not allow user-installed Apps, at least it's less vulnerable to malware.

Something you should probably understand about Amazon is that their Leadership Principles are real, and customer obsession is their main focus.

A big part of customer obsession is not eroding the trust of customers by treating their privacy as extremely important. For example, I've never heard of an incident in the more than two decades that Amazon.com has been in business of them selling customer data to a 3rd party for marketing purposes or otherwise. They wouldn't do something that could erode customer trust, or would be anti-customer, because they are in business for the long haul. Customer trust can only be earned slowly, over time, but can evaporate instantly with one mistake.

I trust Amazon more than Google and others to protect my customer data, because they've frankly earned this trust over 20+ years.

If trust really is so important, then why are fraudulent and counterfeit goods so rampant on their store?

This is not happening. Period. Amazon takes customer trust very very very very seriously.

But you can't prove it's not happening. I'm personally skeptical that it is happening, but you saying "No for real guys, it isn't happening! I double-pinky swear" isn't actually proof of any kind either way.

Facebook, Microsoft and Google say the same thing, doesn't make it true.

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

Or if you have a conversation about coffee[1] including the word Alexa[2], but that cannot be parsed or validated as a "query" and produces no response from the device, does that audio get stored somewhere? Could it be captured in transit by other actors? Seems like an important distinction to me.

[1] Or, y'know, about some subject more subpoenable or privacy-sensitive.

[2] Or, y'know, not including the word Alexa but triggering the on-device recognition anyway. "Alex, uh, here's your payment for murder."

Sentences after the 'Alexa' key word are still recorded as un-identified questions that you can view in the Alexa app. Source: bought mom one, have used it.

According to others in the thread (i know nothing of this), it sounds like that is easily verifiable though, and not done. Ie, it sounds like they've monitored the outbound traffic of the device and it only sends Alexa... requests.

It's possible that they keep a rolling buffer of all audio in the device though. There could be legitimate reason to hold onto such a window of audio. Would make for an interesting discovery.

What would be the legitimate reason to do so? Queries are always preceded by the keyword, so what legitimate reason would there be to record and store audio before the keyword?

I could imagine trying to capture and analyze at least a few words leading up to the trigger word of 'Alexa' to help make it more accurate.

Even if the trigger word is Alexa, different languages, dialects, and slang might vary quite a bit. Some significant portion of people might use "Yo, Alexa...", vs "Hey Alexa...", vs. <a second or two pause> "Alexa...". I'm sure someone with a spouse or child named "Alex", "Alexander", "Alexandra" and so on might also trigger it by accident a bunch, e.g. "Alex, uh, who called?".

Matching all of those trigger patterns would help filter out false positive matches, or take false negatives and refine them so more people can use the product with their own language style and be less frustrated.

You can also configure the wake word as "Echo" or "Amazon" if Alexa is too ambiguous.

"What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, Alexa?"

Allowing that sort of sentence construct violates the privacy afforded by starting with the key phrase. If the Echo did allow this, I would not own one since it would send a lot more unintended sentence fragments to Amazon.

By saying "Alexa" first, it gives me a chance to hear the wake-up tone before I continue my sentence.

So if I'm saying to my friend Alex "Alex uuh, tomorrow we will rob the bank", I have a chance to stop before incriminating myself. But if I say "Tomorrow we'll rob the bank Alex uh... are you in?" and the Echo interprets that as a command, then it's too late, it's already been sent and analyzed.

It's strange that you'd have concerns about privacy when it comes to sentence structure and not that you have a literal black box with a powerful computer and an always on internet connected microphone in it.

Isn't it really easy to run your own code on it? Not really a black box. Except well, literally.

Are you talking about my phone, my car, or my TV?

I trust Amazon more than Samsung, Chevy or, well, Samsung. But at least I can verify that my Echo is not sending home unusual amounts of data when it's not in use.

As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I say will help you.)

Sometimes the wake-word detection is mistakenly triggered and some unrelated audio gets streamed to Amazon, but the LEDs will still light up, and at times it'll even reply to a query that was never intended (I've been watching TV when my Echo will hear something and reply that I don't have any timers set, or whatever) but these recordings would still be covered by the link I pasted in the help text above.

I think a lot of the HN paranoia about these devices is overblown. All of this functionality is provided by devices that you already own, including hardware wake-word detection on all modern smartphones, which I assume everyone here carries around everywhere and recharges daily without much concern.

I think there's a stronger mental disconnect here in a lot of consumers. Detecting the wake word is easy to do locally; doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally.

Because the wake word is able to be processed offline, there is no need for the Echo device to record and transmit audio all the time. While the hardware is physically capable of doing this (and therefore, it will never be possible to fully eliminate doubt in the device's security) it would not be in Amazon's or the customer's best interest. Talk about a waste of resources, and a privacy nightmare!

Exactly. There is no cost model that accounts for the device constantly streaming realtime audio data to Amazon. Just doesn't make sense.

But it could still record background audio and transmit it later to Amazon, when an Alexa query is triggered. How do we know that it doesn't do that? Has anyone opened up the data stream to check what audio it contains?

You can measure the amount of data it's sending so you can at least verify it's not uploading vastly more audio than expected.

They could do sneaky stuff like upload the audio after the wake word + a few seconds BEFORE the wake word. The cost benefit of this doesn't seem high especially if you consider that Amazon says all the time that they want to 'earn customer trust'.

Maybe they have hundreds of secret wake words triggering recording and covert upload of audio. It's not hard to implement - they already have 3 wake words, and ability to record audio locally. A list of national security words and marketing words would be the first choices that pop into my mind.

Do you trust them not to waste this opportunity to get more user info? What about future software updates and especially user targeted software updates? They could avoid detection by only doing surveillance on selected targets. When they are caught, they can justify it with some "improving services" or "software bug" bullshit excuse.

> doing natural language processing on the resulting audio recording is what must be offloaded to Amazon, as it's too computationally heavy to perform that process locally.

This is an unquestioned assumption actually.

I think it's way more to do with the NLP system being very very proprietary.

I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done locally, computing is pretty powerful, but they never bothered to even try and make it work locally. Because "cloud computing" is a dream come true for businesses, hiding their special sauce, not having to explain what they're doing (whether it's hard or not) and always maintain control.

Typical audio compression rates can be 10:1, especially for voice. So if the LED rings are lit for 30 seconds, is there 30 seconds of network activity, or 3 seconds? If it's 30 seconds, either Amazon is grossly wasting internet bandwidth by streaming uncompressed audio, or it is sending 10x as much data as the query it is supposed to be sending.

You do understand that it is trivial to operate the LED lights and microphone independently, right? The hardware /could/ be designed so that the microphone can't be activated without also turning on the LEDs, but I'm guessing they're independently controlled by a microcontroller, and that it's the hidden software which is responsible for turning the LEDs on when the microphone is in use.

Yes, this is a concern for smartphones as well. The capability, even if it is not currently in use, is a concern.

And I'd like to add that even if Amazon doesn't do this, malware could, or certain state actors may compel Amazon to ship this on certain customer's devices.

I'm completely with you. Recording video from webcams without turning on the light indicator has been exploited for years. [1] The FBI director admitted to putting tape over his webcam. Why would anyone think audio is any different?

1: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/12/18/software-allows-hackers-...

I think they're talking about the distinction between the actual audio, which can be listened to and deleted from the Alexa app, and the processed data breaking it down into a (potential) query, possibly sitting nowhere but some query logs for underlying services.

The 'Alexa' voice recognition is done on the client, not on the server. Once the trigger word has been spoken, the audio data begins streaming to the server.

They carefully worded it so that while it is true it only starts transmitting when there is a query, it doesn't stop transmitting afterwards. It could continue recording and sending to the server for the rest of the day, not just the query (just kidding.. I hope).

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