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Comment by kureikain | Hacker News Reader

I have many alexa devices in my home and I love it. They solve lot of problem for us. From automate my home to a speaker(via bluetooth).

But one thing concern me a lot is Alexa is constantly stream/read data to internet. I'm not sure what it's but it consume to 114Mbps per device.

With that huge data it is sending back to Alexa, I imagine they may have a huge team of scientist to work on it.

One thing I noticed is Alexa understand my broken English way better than my wife(native). Probably I have speak to it to much and it learned my voice.

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It's massively insane that people put microphones into their house and willingly stream all conversations to a private 3rd party in exchange for minor convenience.

What's the liability here when I go into someone's house... ? Do I give implied consent? What about states with two party consent?

"Please take off your shoes"

"Please turn off your Alexa"

"Alexa, please set an alarm for 12 hours from now to remind me that you are always listening"

Won't this be the same with any IoT service? You walk past peoples houses who have Ring, it's recording you.

Youre walking by in public; no expectation of privacy.

http://www.americancriminallawreview.com/files/5114/9515/418...

The third party doctrine may be extended to guests visiting a home, but existing law should adapt to require the visitor’s consent. One party consent laws will no longer be feasible in this context without an exception, as they would completely eradicate any expectation of privacy when visiting another’s home.

A more pragmatic approach would be to extend the two party consent laws to owners of recording devices, whereby the duty to disclose that conversations are being recorded would most efficiently be placed on the owner of the recording device.

Consent laws must be modified in order to match the reasonable expectation of privacy of guests visiting another’s home. Owners of an Echo device, similar to banking institutions, should have a duty to disclose to their home guests that conversations may be recorded. The duty of disclosure would best be reflected by a uniform application of the two party consent laws.

That’s a good question— maybe people just need to have a disclaimer on their front door that conversations may be monitored!

>all conversations

I believe Alexa only streams what you say after the trigger word and not all conversations. Assuming you believe Amazon.

if its technically possible to do it without you knowing then all that is left is how much you trust Amazon with that. Note that Amazon may have to surrender its devices access to three letters agencies for random reasons as well. You have to live with that assumption.

Sure. But most people trust corporations with almost all their private correspondences, photos, internet browsing history, shopping behavior, etc. So at that point how much is there to lose by adding everything you say into the mix as well?

Some companies, notably Google and Amazon, have maintenance of customer trust as a core principle. This seems to be working. Generally, people trust a lot of their private data to these companies and the companies do not abuse it.

Microsoft believes in this too, but had to learn the hard way back around 2000 that customer trust matters a lot.

Facebook seems to have had a harder time learning this lesson. Perhaps they've learned it now, but it'll take a while before consumers really believe it.

It's widely understood how the wake-word system works. You can monitor how much data is being uploaded and when. So no, it's not possible to just stream everything you say undetected.

I believe 99 percent of Alexa users wouldn't notice the increased data usage. If "three letter agencies" carefully choose who they spy on, it might go undetected for a very long time.

If a three letter agency is interested in you then you would be lucky if your Alexa is the best bugging device they have.

I notice Amazon's wording about this is pretty careful. The device could still be processing conversations locally to some extent and still be adhering to the wording.

It records every conversation locally in a two second loop I believe, and then streams it after a trigger word.

Correction, it keeps a rolling loop going so that when the CPU hears the wake word it has enough audio buffered for voice recognition to have a clean starting point.

If it only started recording when the wake word was processed as being heard there would be an added delay before you could start speaking a command. Might as well push a button and wait for a beep for that added delay.

And the wake word detection is done offline, as can be easily proven by disconnecting your internet and saying 'Alexa report this conversation to the NSA' - she will wake up, but then blink red due to lack of network connectivity.

Minor correction but it could still do the wake word detection locally, then fail with the red light because the "report this conversation to the NSA" part could not be sent.

Exactly. Everything after the first trigger word you said when you unwrapped and plugged it in is streamed.

Yes, but now I don't have to get up to switch my light off.

I don't get this. Yes, people are lazy, but now everybody has to go to the gym, because otherwise they won't even have a little exercise.

Look, I know how to make my own candles from tallow (including how to bring down the beast to get the fat). Does that mean using electric lights is lazy?

Of course not.

I have my hands full cooking. Is asking "Alexa, set a potato timer for 12 minutes" any lazier than stopping my stirring the sauce, wiping my hands, picking up the timer and punching buttons on it to set a timer? I can keep going about my tasks and have the Alexa device help. Likewise, "Alexa, turn on dinner table" or "Alexa, announce 'Everybody get down here, dinner is ready'" These are little conveniences that keep a busy process going smoothly.

Could I live without them, sure. But I could live without electric lights and plumbing too. But why would I when they exist and are available at a reasonable expense?

Luddites, the lot of you.

It's not about being lazy, it's a huge help if you are multi-tasking and are time poor ,like most parents are. A pretty normal scenario for me is trying to get the kids out the door, whilst doing their shoelaces you tell Alexa to turn off the tv, turn off lights, tell you the weather forecast and when the next bus is due to arrive out the front.

Cell phones and tablets could already be doing this, it's not unique to the ladies in cans.

“Ladies in cans” have a power source that allows them to continuously listen and send back audio.

And so does you phone.. how often do you have your phone on you and it's NOT on?

No, it really doesn’t. Phones run on batteries and continuously listening to and streaming audio would cause them to quickly die.

Maybe they actually do? For example, the 2017 version of the Nokia 3310, according to Nokia, can have calls of ~22h. And that's for a small 1300mAh battery. So it's technically possible to stream audio for a very long time. Maybe smartphones are doing the same in a very low-powered stand by mode?

Yeah but they're not. It would be obvious from the packet traffic if your phone was constantly streaming everything you said to Google or Apple's servers. It would also be a violation of privacy policy and potentially state law. I think there would be huge backlash if either Google or Apple did this.

It doesn't need to constantly stream in order to record everything and send it back in periodic batches. Would it also be possible to determine that from the packet traffic? (not intending to be confrontational here)

The Alexa devices don't have the hardware within to do that. People have torn them down and looked. People have also constructed their own devices (rpi with a mic) to mimic the same functionality and it's consuming the same sort of bandwidth.

Now, of course, nothing will ever placate the conspiracy nitwits.

Thanks for the answer.

I don't see how there's a conspiracy here. Questioning the intentions and actions of an actor that could very likely be hostile to the user is reasonable and has precident.

My parents bought us one for Christmas and I politely refused. There's no way I'm letting those into my house without a huge benefit...

Is that a typo? While I don't doubt that Alexa sends some amount of data to the internet, I find it hard to believe that it uses 114 mbps per device, maybe you meant 14 mbps?

no, it isn't a typo. I really have no idea what it's. They differ from 80Mbps -> 114Mbps.

This is the data to back if up:

https://ibb.co/2Zm11RL https://ibb.co/zmYVP6F

That is the connection speed from the device to the router. Not what it's actually transmitting.

Oh thanks you so much. Now it makes more sense.

Do you have any idea why it takes so much data between the echo and the router then? Other devices in home didn't take that much :(.

You still are not understanding, the tx and rx are simply what speed they are connected at, not any different than your ethernet connection reporting 100 mbps or 1000 mbps, it does not mean it is actually transmitting that much data.

Sorry for my ignorance. You seems to know this stuff very well.

So to clarify, it's mean the speed when the device is connected at, but I saw they changing up and down? How does that get calculated if they aren't the actually transmiting data?

Automatic negotiation with your wireless router. The max tx/rx speed will change regularly, especially if you’re in noisy WiFi area.

If an echo would require 114Mbps, it would barely work for any household, since internet with that speed is far from common. The real required bandwidth should be in the region that is required for transmitting a bit of audio (< 10mbps), and only if audio is active.

This is definitely not universally true. I monitor usage on all my devices pretty carefully - I have several Echos in our house and they never use more than a few hundred kbps and that only rarely. Even with several devices streaming video at once I rarely peak above 50mbps. (1gbps FTTH connection).

There's no way. Alexa could be streaming raw analog sensor data and not use that much bandwith.

You mention your evidence for this assertion further down ( https://ibb.co/2Zm11RL https://ibb.co/zmYVP6F ) but apearson points out "That is the connection speed from the device to the router. Not what it's actually transmitting."

Thank you. That makes more sense now. I have been tracking down a network slow recently and this assumption make me think it's the echo. Now I understand and this is helpful for me to eliminate echo during that troubleshooting.

This is 100% false.

Network traffic seems a bit frequent with a set of packets every 5 minutes or so, but they are very small.

It is def not using 114Mbps all the time. So we are clear, that is 1.2 terabytes PER DAY.

"With that huge data it is sending back to Alexa, I imagine they may have a huge team of scientist to work on it."

OK, there are 100 million or so Alexa devices supposedly sending 1.2 terabytes per day. Where does this stuff come from (seriously).

Folks, most home routers you can actually monitor packet usage by device / port. If interested please do, the results DO NOT match the posters comments.

You mean Kbps? 114 Mbps is the same as a 4k Blu-Ray per device which means you'd have to have >gigabit internet.

I cannot edit this anymore. But just want to let everyone know that I mis-understand the router report page. The report is what between the router and echo device. Though I'm not sure why the communicated between router and echo device are that much...

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