I think the bottom line is Amazon thinks that "Amazon refuses to hand your data over" sounds better than "Amazon Echo data used against man in murder trial".

The latter is likely to deter future purchases and cause many to toss their holiday Alexa gift in a drawer.

More importantly, their lawyers think they can get away with refusing the search warrant as too broad or claiming it sets a precedent of invading privacy.

nevermind your smartphone

...or you live somewhere with glass windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone

Laser microphones at least require you to be targeted prior to the warrant, and typically require someone on the other end. They can't retroactively request data from a laser microphone attached to most US households.

Given the cost of laser diodes is now pennies, how much would it cost to target every window in a city?

You still have to distribute and read those sensors.

I'm imagining drones putting sensor domes with ~100 laser diodes each on top of existing street lights, using in the order of a few watts from a small solar cell and battery to do basic signal processing (most windows will be silent most of the time) and uploading anything possibly interesting over a standard mobile data connection.

Then process the possibly interesting signals with a voice-to-text system similar to Alexa/Siri/Google/Cortana and now there's a searchable text database of everything spoken next to a window in a city.

That would be, what, mid tens to mid hundreds of millions of £ for London? Compared to the annual budget of £3.24 billion?

edit: possibility->possibly

Well, yes. Quite a possibility. In fact you wouldn't need the drones. People putting them there will receive much less attention.

I still can't imagine those globes deciding what is "interesting" and what is not on a solar panel power budget. But at this point it's guaranteed to become viable at some point, and I don't have all the info to conclude it's not viable now.

But when you defend cowardice and the status quo, you don't need arguments. You just need to smirk and say something utterly dumb like the comment about glass windows, and you're mostly golden.

>First thought that comes to mind is: If Amazon lets the police access the Echo it would prove they're constantly listening, even if the device is in "Mute" mode

Yeah, but this is entirely ridiculous. It's trivial for anyone with access to the device to verify that it most likely doesn't do that.

Not if you're a conspiracy theorist and don't trust anybody -- then everybody always has a reason to listen in on your mundane conversations!

I like your qualifier, "most likely".

How would one determine if it is not buffering and compressing data client-side for later transmission during "firmware" updates?

Additionally, who has setup an automated testing framework for such things after each firmware upgrade?

How many firmware upgrades have there been for the Echo?

Also, how do we know that your Echo and my Echo are running the same firmware, and will always run the same firmware version?

>I like your qualifier, "most likely".

Yeah, it gets harder when you need to be sure.

>How would one determine if it is not buffering and compressing data client-side for later transmission during "firmware" updates?

AFAIK you can root the device pretty easily, so you should be at least able to verify that the main OS of the device isn't doing this.

>Also, how do we know that your Echo and my Echo are running the same firmware, and will always run the same firmware version?

Boot them both from a read only SD card.

> AFAIK you can root the device pretty easily, so you should be at least able to verify that the main OS of the device isn't doing this.

And if it doesn't, you still don't know. So why even bother? Why not simply throw it and anyone peddling it out of the window? That's making sure rather than derping about.

Do you really have 0 microphones in your house? What about speakers, those are basically microphones too?

If you have access to the main OS it's also relatively easy to verify that the secretly recorded audio data isn't being uploaded anywhere, unless these devices have some secret radio equipment in them.