Re:Big tech lobbying gutted a bill that would ban recording ...
by lazyjones on Sunday April 14, 2019 @06:20AM
(#19658515)
> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded,
There is a certain spectrum of possibilities for how Alexa can handle this audio, all plausible and not equally worthy of consent: from immediate offline processing after explicit activation (never even record a whole command, just as much as is needed and never start processing unless a trigger word was said) to uploading everything to Amazon (including things that may or may not have been trigger words) and having employees listen in on private conversations.
Non-IT-people won't be able to know exactly what they're supposedly consenting to, nor whether what Amazon and Google are doing is actually necessary for their gadget to function.
There is a certain spectrum of possibilities for how Alexa can handle this audio, all plausible and not equally worthy of consent: from immediate offline processing after explicit activation (never even record a whole command, just as much as is needed and never start processing unless a trigger word was said) to uploading everything to Amazon (including things that may or may not have been trigger words) and having employees listen in on private conversations.
Non-IT-people won't be able to know exactly what they're supposedly consenting to, nor whether what Amazon and Google are doing is actually necessary for their gadget to function.