Study: Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

theregister.com

37 points·samizdis··6 comments

I met an Amazon Echo developer once. Apparently the biggest use case for voice assistants is getting the weather.

Anecdotally- my household use is 50% weather, 30% public radio, 18% Spotify, 2% random google searches / trivia

You don't use timers?

We're 50% timers, 25% shopping lists, and another 95% the kids asking it to do animal noises.

Ha! You’re right. I forgot about timers, it’s definitely mostly timers - multiple, undifferentiated, timers running simultaneously.

Revised: 50% timers 28% weather, 10% public radio, 10% Spotify, 2% random google searches / trivia

tl;dr: This only covers interactions that are after the wake word (and hence show up on My Activity, etc).

This doesn't help prove/disprove the "these devices are listening all the time" meme

I'm sorry, this is a pretty awful take on the tl;dr for this particular article, and pretty solidly misses the point.

> data is collected both by Amazon and third-parties and that Amazon shares user data with as many as 41 ad partners.

> 70 percent of Skills fail to mention Alexa or Amazon, and a mere 2.2 percent make their data collection practices clear in their privacy policies

> "Amazon’s inference of advertising interests from users’ voice is a clear violation of their policies and public statements," the researchers state in their paper. "Amazon does not provide transparency in usage of data and thus cannot be reliably trusted to protect user privacy."

A better tl;dr would be something like "Amazon violates it's stated policies on using voice assistant data to target ads, makes a ton of money of the practice, obfuscates the whole thing by not making its collection policies clear, and then calls research into it inaccurate without providing any evidence."

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