{"id":32115,"date":"2018-03-09T08:54:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T13:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32115"},"modified":"2018-03-09T08:54:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T13:54:28","slug":"amazon-partnership-with-british-police-alarms-privacy-advocates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32115","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Partnership With British Police Alarms Privacy Advocates"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Joby Sessions\/T3 Magazine\/Getty Images<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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AMAZON PARTNERSHIP WITH BRITISH POLICE ALARMS PRIVACY ADVOCATES<\/a><\/h3>\n
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POLICE IN LANCASHIRE<\/u>, a county in northwest England, have rolled out a program to broadcast crime updates, photos of wanted and missing people, and safety notifications to Amazon Echo owners. Since February, the free app<\/a> has been available to those using Alexa, a cloud-based voice assistant hooked up to the Echo smart speaker. The first of its kind in the U.K., the program was developed by the police force\u2019s innovations manager in a partnership with Amazon developers.<\/p>\n

The program marks the latest example of third parties aiding<\/a>, automating<\/a>, and in some cases, replacing<\/a>, the functions of law enforcement agencies \u2014 and raises privacy questions<\/a> about Amazon\u2019s role as an intermediary. Lancashire County will store citizens\u2019 crime reports on Amazon\u2019s servers, rather than those operated by the police. \u201cIf we can reduce demand into our call centers via the use of voice recognition or voice-enabled technology, and actually give the community the information they need without them needing to ring into police, then that\u2019s massive,\u201d Rob Flanagan, Lancashire Constabulary innovations manager, told the College of Policing conference, according to<\/a> TechSpot.<\/p>\n

But broadcasting is just the beginning of the county\u2019s plans. The next iteration of the pilot program, expected to launch by year\u2019s end, will allow users to report crimes directly to their smart speakers. After that, Flanagan imagines that Alexa might be used not just by civilians, but internally by officers for briefings and important information. \u201cThe cop [would] be able to say \u2018Give me the warrant details for Joe Blocks,\u2019 and then it would read back that person\u2019s warrant and details and send the information to the offices mobile device that they have on their person,\u201d Flanagan told Gizmodo<\/a>. (Flanagan and the Lancashire Constabulary did not respond to repeated requests for comment).<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: Joby Sessions\/T3 Magazine\/Getty Images AMAZON PARTNERSHIP WITH BRITISH POLICE ALARMS PRIVACY ADVOCATES POLICE IN LANCASHIRE, a county in northwest England, have rolled out a program to broadcast crime updates, photos of wanted and missing people, and safety notifications to Amazon Echo owners. Since February, the free app has been available to those using Alexa, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[19178,977,19180,93,19179,4627,652,765,5567],"class_list":["post-32115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-alexa","tag-amazon","tag-ava-kofman","tag-britain","tag-echo","tag-lancashire","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32115"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32117,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32115\/revisions\/32117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}