By geoffreyfowler: When Alexa runs your home, Amazon tracks you in more ways than you might want
By Geoffrey A. Fowler Geoffrey A. Fowler Technology columnist based in San Francisco Email Bio Follow Technology columnist May 6 at 9:00 AM Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, “Are you crazy?”
For as much as we fret about snooping apps on our computers and phones, our homes are where the rubber really hits the road for privacy. It’s easy to rationalize away concerns by thinking a single smart speaker or appliance couldn’t know enough to matter. But across the increasingly connected home, there’s a brazen data grab going on, and there are few regulations, watchdogs or common-sense practices to keep it in check.
What can you do to stop Alexa from recording? Amazon’s answer is straight out of the Facebook playbook: “Customers have control,” it says — but the product’s design clearly isn’t meeting our needs. You can manually delete past recordings if you know exactly where to look and remember to keep going back. You cannot stop Amazon from making these recordings, aside from muting the Echo’s microphone or unplugging the darned thing.
Saving our voices is not just an Amazon phenomenon. Apple, which is much more privacy-minded in other aspects of the smart home, also keeps copies of conversations with Siri. Apple says voice data is assigned a “random identifier and is not linked to individuals” — but exactly how anonymous can a recording of your voice be? I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t give us the ability to say not to store our recordings.
If you use Sonos speakers with Alexa, Sonos keeps track of what albums, playlists or stations you listen to — and shares that information with Amazon. The spy in your thermostat Inspired by what I found in my Alexa voice archive, I wondered: What other activities in my smart home are tech companies recording?When I’m up for a midnight snack, Google knows.
You can't stop Amazon from collecting data about smart home devices connected to Alexa, but you can tell Amazon to delete the data it already has collected at amazon.com/alexaprivacy. Amazon acknowledges it collects data about third-party devices even when you don’t use Alexa to operate them. It says Alexa needs to know the “state” of your devices “to enable a great smart home experience.” But keeping a record of this data is more useful to them than to us.
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