Smart Speakers “Accidentally” Listen Up to 19 Times A Day
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
So how often are smart speakers listening when they shouldn't? A team of researchers at Boston's Northeastern University are conducting an ongoing study to determine just how bad the problem really is. They've set up an experiment to generate unexpected activation triggers and study them inside and out.
The team corralled a group of mainstream smart speakers into a box representing all the major players - four Alexas and one each of her cohorts. We'd love to see them maximize the test subjects by including enough devices of each type to cover all the possible assigned wake words, but that would be pretty expensive.
Then they piped in 125 hours worth of audio from TV shows with rapid-fire dialogue using Netflix. The shows they chose are healthy cross-section of televised entertainment - mostly newer stuff, but some going back a decade or more. Everything from comedy to drama. A video camera trained on the speakers will record any lights that indicate a successful activation. There's also a microphone to pick up anything the devices say in response to the dialogue stream, and a WAP to capture network traffic in and out of the box.
While the results indicate that these devices aren't constantly recording (phew!), they do tend to wake up quite frequently for short periods of time - up to 19 times in a 24-hour period. The worst offenders were the Apple and Microsoft speakers, both of which activated more often than the others. Not all of the activations were short and sweet, though - both the Microsoft Invoke and the Echo Dot had accidental activations lasting up to 43 seconds long. That's plenty of time to record and/or distribute your late-night 16-digit utterances to the QVC operators, or the secret ingredient in your mother-in-law's Quiche Lorraine.
-- submitted from IRC
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.