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A comment on Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case. Parent comment

Re:Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case by discodave on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @08:25PM (#13267757)
You can measure the amount of data it's sending so you can at least verify it's not uploading vastly more audio than expected.

They could do sneaky stuff like upload the audio after the wake word + a few seconds BEFORE the wake word. The cost benefit of this doesn't seem high especially if you consider that Amazon says all the time that they want to 'earn customer trust'.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case by visarga on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @03:13AM (#13269181)
Maybe they have hundreds of secret wake words triggering recording and covert upload of audio. It's not hard to implement - they already have 3 wake words, and ability to record audio locally. A list of national security words and marketing words would be the first choices that pop into my mind.

Do you trust them not to waste this opportunity to get more user info? What about future software updates and especially user targeted software updates? They could avoid detection by only doing surveillance on selected targets. When they are caught, they can justify it with some "improving services" or "software bug" bullshit excuse.

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