Amazon Argues Alexa Speech Protected By First Amendment In Murder Trial Fight

They have very good business reasons to do this.

If they do end up giving out the data they will most probably face a severe dip in sales as most people (even those who aren't that privacy focused) will be scared of buying it.

I've been putting off buying one of these devices (Echo/Google Home, etc) just becasue I dont like someone listening to me all the time. But I'm usually a bit paranoid about privacy.

The complexity of the issue concerns the specific use in this instance and its application to broader uses in other possible cases. I think they're fighting/trying to fight future fights with this approach. I say this because their current stance is relatively weak when regarding this case alone (IMO obviously). The guy was murdered, Alexa is a recording device, they want to see the recordings. This isn't overly broad in this case, but in the future it may be attempted to be applied to other cases walking down the proverbial slippery slope.

This is of course in addition to them already fighting a technophobic AI battle in consumers' minds, gradually introducing AI functionality to the masses. This, I think, is largely why they are so reluctant to introduce push notifications even though so many fellow Alexa Skill developers would like it.

In the end though, if I were murdered and Alexa was in the room - I'd want them to give them the darn recordings. Which makes me wonder, what does the family of the victim want?

I suspect they believe they're fighting against a potential chilling of speech. Similar to how constant surveillance affects people's words and behavior.

But to me it seems Amazon has more of a business problem than a legal one: if customers know Alexa is "listening" and that law enforcement can get at the recordings, they'll be less likely to speak openly around the device, or just turn it off and never buy one again.

If they lose this case, this entire product category goes in the shitter.

No one wants a government listening device in their house, which is essentially what this is if the government can issue a search warrant for recordings.

So, it seems highly likely that the device doesn't have the information the police want. Barring any nasty surprises, Alexa only stores the actual requests made to it.

However, Amazon doesn't want to win this case based on the technical details of this specific device, because maybe a future device will store more—and then they'd need to fight this battle all over again.

So they're trying to make an argument that doesn't rest on the technical details of their current devices. If they win that, then they won't have to worry about this kind of case later.

apparently they give the ability to access your communication with Alexa with a phone app. So they put themselves in a box by having features in an app that prevent anonymization of the data. Going forward they may have to drop the app or limit its functionality.

I don't have the app in question and am only extrapolating based on the text in the article. Does anyone here have the Alexa app? What are its features?

So is law enforcement going to try to go with voluntarily allowing recording of oneself allows them access? Push a claim that Amazon has no standing in the case and cannot object?

  why isn't alexa scrubbing the data or anonymising it?

So that if you're a parent and Amazon ships you a doll house, you can figure out whether it was ordered by you, your partner, your child, a TV presenter, or an Amazon mistake.

Recognizing spoken word can be improved when you have historical data related to a specific user (or a smaller group of users sharing the device).

Sure, anonymizing it and aggregating much larger numbers helps too. But modeling specific speech of one person, as well as the type of requests they make (to better understand/predict future recognition), can offer better improvements.

As a non-lawyer and not legally trained it seems like 1st amendment has nothing to do with this but 4th and 5th has everything. This is scary. It means the 4th and 5th amendment has no power with these devices?

Thanks I wanted to ask the same as a non-American. If this is protected then surely so is internet history, call metadata etc.?

Yeah, and honestly I don't feel like the defense will hold up for much. It's not uncommon or unreasonable to request data from a company pertaining to a criminal investigation. It's not an overreaching request, they're asking for a narrow field of data, they have probable cause for a warrant. This is really not unusual from a criminal investigation standpoint, except for the interface in question being somewhat novel.

But the case has gotten national attention, and people are talking about privacy of services like this, so it makes sense for them to put up that "we're protecting your data" fight. But the only real way to protect your data from the government is simply to not collect it in the first place.

I thought it was strange too. I would suspect the caselaw involving the First Amendment provides more definition of the limits upon governments than the Privacy amendments, especially since this is such a novel set of facts with no easily applicable precedent. First Amendment seems to be more broadly protected than privacy anyways, so extending it to this set of circumstances would be ultimately useful.

However, their First Amendment argument would be more compelling if the search request was wider instead of specific. It looks like the request only wants a 48 hour period, so its not a dragnet kind of request (i.e., who checked out books on chemistry in the past 4 weeks?). In the event the ruling is against Amazon, I would guess the in camera evaluation will probably happen.

It's right there in the article.

Amazon is arguing that handing over the data would chill speech by making people fear that conversations they would otherwise consider private may be used against them by government, and as such have a similar effect to direct censorship.

I have no idea about the strength of that argument, but that's the argument they made.

Not a lawyer, but I imagine they have not ability to exercise the fifth amendment as it's not self-incrimination, and I believe only natural persons (i.e. not corporations) are protected by it.

One of the things that they are arguing (per the article) is that _Alexa's_ speech is protected under the First Amendment (similar to a case that was decided in favor of Google relating to search results.)

It's a good question, and vidarh's response that "it's right there in the article: chilling effect" is clearly not helpful, since your question still applies without modification.

Looking through the memorandum, it appears that there are different levels of need/importance the government must establish depending on whether they are requesting information that could chill free speech. That is, warrants are granted more liberally for information that does not have a tendency to suppress speech (e.g., the date you filed for your car registration) than info that does (e.g., the list of books you've checked out at the library). The latter category must be shown to be more directly related to the issue of the case, rather than being merely a search for possibly-useful background info.

Amazon is arguing that (1) Alexa searches are of this second, more protected form of private information, and (2) the government has not met the higher burden of showing their importance to the case.

That, at least, is my reading of the memorandum. I am not a lawyer.

> "Don't forget Jeff Bezos's CIA connections"

There aren't "connections". Amazon is just building a private cloud for the CIA. There's nothing nefarious going on.

How do you know the exact number of devices, suspicious.

Why would the situation be any different than a person or traditional recording equipment doing those things?

If you want to live with observers, you have always had to accept that they can be used in court.

Maybe it's more akin to the fifth amendment rights of a spouse/significant other/close family? I don't think Amazon would have an easy case in either direction, but at least to this layman it sounds more like a fifth amendment issue than a first amendment issue.

The intersection of hard to prove murders and Alexa is going to be tiny.

For what purpose, exactly?

No, but companies are (sigh). This is really an expression of Citizens United. Alexa and Siri use cute names to cover it, but "Ok Google" reveals what you're really interacting with for these sorts of tools: You're talking to a company.

No, they are also claiming it extends to Alexa's responses.