Actually, this is not 100% correct, but it could be. Police working a murder case in Bentonville, Arkansas, are "courting" lady Alexa, literally.
Who is Alexa? Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon.com. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real time information. It is actually very cool.
Local Bentonville police have issued Amazon a warrant for the voice recordings of Amazon Alexa Echo owner James Andrew Bates. He is accused of murdering Victor Collins in his hot tub after a night of drinking in November of 2015.
Amazon’s Echo works by passively recording everything you say. It is always listening. Everything you say, to your wife, husband, kids, friends, even your side of your telephone calls, it is passively recording. This means that it is listening, but not Actively recording... What does this mean?
When the Echo hears “Alexa” (or one of the other wake up words), it begins to actively record. When it hears the Wake word, it will actively record and send a snippet of speech just before the Wake word, along with the rest of your request. Your request is then sent to Amazon’s cloud servers, where your recorded message is run through a speech-recognition network and a response is sent back to you.
Police seized the Echo and served a warrant to Amazon, stating in the affidavit there was “reason to believe that Amazon.com is in possession of records related to a homicide investigation being conducted by the Bentonville Police Department. Supposedly Amazon declined to turn the actual voice-search queries over to the local police, though it did send the authorities other user account data.
This is not all. Detectives discovered other "smart home” devices, including a smart water meter, a Nest thermostat, a Honeywell alarm system, a wireless weather monitoring system and the Amazon Echo. Police are actually focusing more on the data collected from his smart water meter than his Echo. They say an abnormal amount of water was used when they believe Collins was killed, allegedly an indicator of Bates having washed away blood.
This case has raised fresh questions about privacy issues regarding devices like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home, voice-activated personal command centers that are constantly “listening”.
Just what are we willing to trade for our toys?
Apparently everything.
Comment (0)
Hits: 479
