Statistical Analysis shows Echos process voice to serve ads

I have the feeling, that the paper is flawed and missing an important experiment. All their results seem to rely on skills being used. There is indeed a need then for Amazon to prevent user tracking in skills (like for example Apple does and requires consent by the user). But to come to the conclusion that Amazon shares the data with advertisers I would have expected an experiment with eliminating skills as a reason and just having personas interact with Alexa core services. I guess just from shopping questions or general knowledge questions a lot of information for ad targeting could be inferred. If that’s however not influencing ads served when no skills are used, then it’s not necessarily Amazon directly sharing the information, but the skills being able to do so using Amazons provided tooling.<p>That’s a difference at least for my interpretation how “evil” company xyz is.

Paper seems to actually show things like “If you install the Fitness skill, Amazon shows you fitness ads”, but that’s less sexy, I guess.

I would be SUPER interested to see this same methodology applied to an iPhone or an Android phone resting in a room. I&#x27;ve already had the feeling that discussions that I had, later had an impact on my ads, but never knew if it was random or not.

The problem isn&#x27;t the lack of knowledge. The problem is lack of alternatives. Name a single privacy preserving smart home assistant that the average person can buy, install, and use.<p>Market theory says people will vote with their wallet, which is why I boycott all of them. But I&#x27;m under no delusion that my behavior will change anything. Voting with your wallet only works if someone is willing to offer what you want.

The full title is &quot;Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem&quot;<p>It&#x27;s about the interactions with Echos, and not as some other comments imply, about listening to general conversations passively. Although, the experiment setup might be used to study this in a future experiment.

I&#x27;m always surprised at others&#x27; surprise that voice assistants are data gatherers for ads (maybe except for Siri?). Isn&#x27;t the entire business model just 2 things:<p>- Gather data for ads<p>- Corner the &quot;smart assistant&quot; market... so you can gather more data for ads

I’m not surprised that asking “Alexa, what is the price of a flight from Moscow to Kyiv” will be processed for advertisement and personalization purposes, but I would be surprised if “Hey, John. Did you hear the news about Ukraine?” did.

The link below is 100% not how this happens as it’s owned by oracle, but if you’d like to read about text&#x2F;nlp and how it’s used in adtech today from a technical perspective this is an excellent read. This product has been the #1 product in this space for many years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oracle.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ocom&#x2F;docs&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;acquisitions&#x2F;grapeshot-methodology.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oracle.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ocom&#x2F;docs&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;acquisitions&#x2F;gr...</a>

From what is worth, I&#x27;m a data scientist who has worked on ads in the past. I&#x27;ve always been under the impression that massive scale audio processing for ad targetting was way too expensive when compared to the signal we can extract from the audio data and as compared to the final ad conversion. I mean, at least from the prices of having an instance processing streams&#x2F;bacthes of audio data just to sort out brands&#x2F;products&#x2F;services that were mentioned in those audio streams.<p>In my understanding, showing ads for what people that are connected to you searched&#x2F;bought&#x2F;interacted, as in a simple network analysis, would be much cheaper and would give you very similar results.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, monetisation and indiscriminate collection of user data should be illegal.

I&#x27;m surprised that anyone is surprised by this.<p>A bit more than a decade ago, in a meeting at Lab126 where we were discussing a then secret future product with voice recognition -- in particular &quot;keyword spotting&quot;, so that it could wake up on command -- I said something like: &quot;I doubt this will work, to get high enough accuracy we&#x27;d have to stream data constantly for analysis, and consumers would have to expect this. No one would buy it.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve since learned never to underestimate the naivete of others.

It&#x27;s baffling that so many people insist this is not happening, or that it&#x27;s too computationally expensive.<p>On several occasions I&#x27;ve seen ads appear based upon things being discussed, but never searched. Always with the realization I was near a smart device with a microphone (or an app with permissions)<p>I think in hindsight this will be similar to the realization that systems like XKeyscore and PRISM were not only technically possible but already deployed.

OOOOooooooohhh this one&#x27;s really drawing a lot of damage control. Simple anecdotal evidence was enough to convince me and many other people years ago that Google and Amazon, at the very least, were spying in every way possible. Why wouldn&#x27;t they? Users have technically agreed to all data collection anyway. It simply doesn&#x27;t make sense to not collect data, if there is an option to.

Honestly I can&#x27;t see why anyone has these smart speakers anyways. Best case scenario is what, saving a minute by not typing in a Google query or phone number?<p>Doesn&#x27;t seem like a sufficient benefit when you consider the downside -- a device listening to your conversations and selling that data to ad agencies.

Mild shock.

Based on anecdotal experience, giving a smartphone app access to your microphone &quot;while using the app&quot; results in targeted ads for things you were talking about within 10-15 minutes of having the app open. I haven&#x27;t done any strict science to confirm it, but I&#x27;m obsessive about privacy and can almost always track down the likely reason when I get an accurately targeted ad. I&#x27;m my opinion, it&#x27;s naive to think that our voices aren&#x27;t being processed by tech companies to serve ads at every opportunity. I&#x27;m glad to see some analysis proving it, and I think we need more of that because the problem definitely isn&#x27;t limited to Amazon.

What ads do Echo devices say or show?<p>Aside from annoying suggestions like &quot;By the way, you can ask me who the most famous person in the world is&quot;.

I work at Amazon and this not happen. It&#x27;s not true.

As other commenters in the thread have pointed out, this might not be as quite a smoking gun as it would appear.<p>However, I still feel weird with these devices in the room. I have decided I am not going to trust them, I won&#x27;t ever trust them, and I&#x27;m blaming them until they show us the code.<p>I know I&#x27;m a doomer and a fatalist, but holy crap we are sleep-walking into dystopia. Your average HNer might be a little more attuned to the possibilities for abuse here, but the billions of clueless customers and hundreds of billions of dollars to be made will just keep tempting these behemoths further over the line and renormalize all of society around pervasive surveillance capitalism.<p>The entire psychological context of life has changed, and I&#x27;m not super OK with it, TBH.

My Alexa and Facebook are spookily linked.

Say it ain&#x27;t so!

Uff