Amazon confirms it keeps your Alexa recordings basically forever
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It’s honestly ridiculous and only government intervention will prevent this from getting out of hand.
Their business model doesn't involve monetizing user's data, and they've been public and explicit about that.
If their promise is broken, their brand will suffer.
Amazon has no such promise or brand. They offer low prices and high convenience.
The other thing is that sometimes a company does something by accident that would damage the brand if anyone finds out, and covering it up is the only way to save it. I don't think there's any way to prevent this from happening somewhere at a huge company from the top, because people are always going to make mistakes and bad decisions and then they don't want anyone to know for fear of consequences.
When has Apple ever done that?
Apple's style would be getting everyone to buy into the feature that has privacy implications with some mitigations.
1. Non-tech people, who don't understand the immediate technical aspects of what's happening, and haven't had much occasion to think about the implications.
2. Tech people, many of us who do understand a lot of what's happening in technical levels, but are conditioned by all the practices around us (and our paychecks/startups depending on it) to not think of this as bad for society.
Wifi/ethernet and AC-connected devices change the risk/benefit calculation significantly.
Alexa or Google Assistant on a phone is therefore not really the same thing as Alexa or Google on a standalone plug-in device.
For example, a google phone (depending on model/setup) and Google mini might both listening all the time for "Hey google". Both respond by listening and recording the next collection of sounds. However, the bar for deciding when to ship that audio off to Google, or when it's confident enough it can handle processing on-device, could easily change depending on whether the device is battery-powered or whether it's on wifi/eth instead of mobile. A wall-powered device might opt to keep a running history in ram of the last N seconds of audio, so it has more context with which to answer questions if Google Assistant is addressed. If it's battery powered, there are obvious reasons not to do that unless the phone has a dedicated extremely low powered continuous recording loop circuit.
It's one thing to think "Oh, sure they record me but nobody is going to sit through everything I said".
It's another thing to understand that with machine learning Amazon might be able to parse this data almost instantly and categorize you, rate you and analyse you without breaking a sweat.
1. good audio compression and selective removal of empty data with time stamps
2. Speech recognition algorithms that convert recorded data to text content
you could hold a non-trivial amount of data in cold storage.
For instance, all the US government security clearance investigations were leaked to someone unknown several years ago. The consequence for most people was a short period of credit monitoring and nothing notable otherwise. But if someone now has a database of all possible compromising information, fingerprints, and other information for everyone who's had a position of trust with the government, then some day when a previous "nobody" is suddenly of interest, then that data can be leveraged.
Non-tech folks have no idea what is going on and if they were told this was an always-on recording device, some of them might actually freak out.
Alexa speakers, of course, are surveillance devices and if you have it on it seems fair to say you have opted in.
I set mine to search in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-replace-google-assi...
It seems pretty clear that there are lots of people who want this and I'd be surprised if more companies don't start doing it. Snapchat made its name with auto-deleting videos.