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#voiceassistants

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Kathy Reid

Amazon is changing some #privacy features for Alexa-powered Echo devices today. It's part of a broader move to seek #ROI on its investment in #VoiceAssistants and in broader generative #AI capabilities - through #PlatformCapitalism.

My latest for @theconversationau with thanks to Michael Lucy for his work in editing.

theconversation.com/everything

The ConversationEverything you say to an Alexa speaker will be sent to Amazon – starting today
More from The Conversation AU + NZ
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"[A] team of researchers recently set out to determine just how much companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are using the data gathered through their voice assistants to profile us –– track and monitor our behavior –– across the internet.
(...)
The study focused on the behaviors of the three biggest voice assistant platforms: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. What researchers found was that how concerned you should be about your smart assistant profiling you varies greatly depending on which device you use.

But in order to figure this out, they had to essentially trick voice assistants into profiling them.

They downloaded publicly available information that Google compiles on every user based on their searches, like gender, age range, relationship status and income bracket. Using those labels, they were able to design questions that could easily convince the platforms that they were, for example, married, had children or were a homeowner not a renter.

The researchers then recorded themselves asking these questions and replayed the audio to voice assistants over and over again. Over the course of 20 months, they conducted 1,171 experiments involving nearly 25,000 queries.
(...)
What they ended up finding was that Alexa exhibits the most straightforward kind of profiling behavior: It’s all based on your interest in products.
(...)
However, with Siri and Google Assistant, things are more complicated.

After reaching out to Apple to get their data, the company insisted “they had no data on us,” Choffnes says, “which means we couldn’t even test anything or prove any hypothesis about whether there was any profiling happening.”
(...)
Meanwhile, Google Assistant was the strangest of the bunch. The researchers found that it was clearly profiling its users but often incorrectly."
news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/

Northeastern Global News · Your voice assistant is profiling you, just not in the way you expect, new research findsBy Cody Mello-Klein
#VoiceAssistants#IoT#SmartObjects
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