I find the title biased against Amazon to begin with.
As if having assistants from other companies listening in was any safer. Why namedrop Amazon's own?
As if having assistants from other companies listening in was any safer. Why namedrop Amazon's own?
I think it's important to not overly freak out about these home assistants. Your phone company or video conferencing company is already listening to your confidential client calls. Your email provider is reading your email. Your internal applications run on Amazon's servers. Your upstairs neighbor has their ear to the floor. I think lawyers are used to thinking "as long as it's not in writing, we're okay", but with speech recognition getting better and better, your phone calls / VCs are going to show up in court someday.
You treat these things as third-party listening devices - bugs, because that is exactly what they are, and adjust your conversation accordingly unless/until it is unplugged.
Look at it from a lawyer's perspective: imagine your privileged conversation with your client did leak. Your client sues you. If there was a surveillance speaker in the room it doesn't matter if it leaked because of it. You just demonstrated extreme lack of care by discussing privileged information in front of a networked microphone.
There's also a thing where if a communication is privileged, and you accidentally produce it, you may not be able to unscramble the egg just because in principle it was covered by lawyer-client privilege. So there is a real risk to recording things even if there are rules protecting you.
And only corporate firewalls and some bad providers would prevent it from working today.
My email provider surely isn’t reading my mail, but then again, I seem to be in a minority that doesn’t use gmail.
The threat of real-time speech-to-text is real, but police all over the world have made the mistake of spying on lawyers now and then.
If my neighbor was listening to my conversations AND running the third largest ad platform on the internet, it would alarm me.
These aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons.
But, incentives are not crypto. There is probably nothing nefarious going on, but if you use open-source software with strong cryptography, a service provider that wants to be nefarious is simply unable to do so. That is what lawyers should be aiming for; freaking out about Alexa is a feel-good stopgap at best.
==“Perhaps we’re being slightly paranoid but we need to have a lot of trust in these organizations and these devices,” Hancock said. “We’d rather not take those risks.”==
Seems like a pretty reasonable measure and advice. The baseline assumption you make is that you know the who, what, where and when of Amazon sharing data.
Does Amazon actually have an incentive not to violate your trust? You could make the same argument about Facebook and they have routinely violated users trust. It seems the real lesson is that without legal protection for consumers, companies will continue operating in the gray area.
Sure. But the title is what it is.
The correct answer is that yep you should consider what is in the room if you need a private conversation because devices are listening.
The title is also incredibly niche and alarmist. Only locked down lawyers need to worry about Alexa??
Google sneaked a microphone in some speaker device trojan-horse style, enabling it only when lots of such speakers were already deployed. Sneaky.