No, Alexa is not listening to you
By: Todd H. Albert
Tags: Privacy, Smart Speaker, Conspiracy Theories

Not a week goes by that I don’t speak with someone understandably suspicious of the proliferation of smart speakers in our homes and office. Clearly these devices are able to respond to our voice commands and have an immediate connection to the Internet. So being dubious is completely natural. But are these speakers compromising our privacy?

In short, no. I know that the skeptical among you may discard my answer, and that is fine, but I will now present some hard and soft evidence to support this truth. Some of the hard evidence might be a bit tech-heavy, but feel free to skim to the softer bits of evidence.

First, hundreds of engineers across dozens of companies have worked on these devices and the software that controls them and the APIs (software in the cloud) that they “phone home” to. All of these engineers agree that these speakers are safe. (Soft evidence)

Second, millions of engineers around the world have now gotten their hands on these speakers and are able to dissect, reverse-engineer, and monitor them. In fact, you can do this monitoring yourself if you have a smart speaker. Within your own home or business, you’re able to monitor all of your network traffic, which means we can see which devices in our homes are sending data over our network, to where, and what times. These devices are not constantly streaming our conversations or recording them. We can tell. We can measure this. (Hard evidence)

Third, if actual evidence surfaced that one of these large tech companies (i.e. Amazon, Apple, Google) were monitoring the private conversations in our homes and offices, what would essentially amount to warrantless wiretapping, they would face massive legal and class-action repercussions that would be so large, they would end these companies. (Soft evidence)

Fourth, no one wants to listen to your boring conversations anyway. Seriously. Have you ever stayed at someone else’s home? Have you had to listen to the boring conversations they have? After three days (according to Franklin, at least), you’re about ready to off yourself. Our conversations are not that interesting. So no company would bother to spend the time, money, and human capital to listen to our conversations. (Soft evidence)

Fifth, companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon already have a ton of big data on us… so much that it’s nearly impossible to process all of it. They already know everything about us. Like when we’re craving pizza or shopping for cars. They don’t need to listen in. (Soft evidence)

Finally, the way these speakers actually work is different than you likely think. Originally, when Amazon released the Echo speaker, the trigger name “Alexa” was going to be customizable. But their engineers struggled to develop this feature. In fact, they ended up having to bake the “Alexa” trigger into the hardware such that it cannot ever be changed without replacing the speaker. So the voice pattern the speaker listens for to snap it into listen mode is highly-specific to the speaker itself. So, other than “Hey Siri”, “Ok, Google”, or “Alexa”, these speakers aren’t listening to a thing you say. (Medium softness)

Let me know in the comments if I’ve assuaged your fears at all.