{"id":45635,"date":"2019-04-25T07:46:33","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T12:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=45635"},"modified":"2019-04-25T07:46:35","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T12:46:35","slug":"thousands-of-amazon-alexa-eavesdroppers-can-also-access-users-home-addresses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=45635","title":{"rendered":"Thousands Of Amazon Alexa Eavesdroppers Can Also Access Users’ Home Addresses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thousands Of Amazon Alexa Eavesdroppers Can Also Access Users’ Home Addresses<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg has it in for Amazon these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two weeks after we finally got confirmation <\/a>what everyone had known for so long, namely that an internal Amazon team numbering in the thousands was secretly listening in to Alexa users\u2019 commands without their prior knowledge, Bloomberg reported <\/a>that the same team also has access to location data and can easily find a customer\u2019s home address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Citing five (supposedly former) employees familiar with the program, Bloomberg writes that the covert “Alexa team”, which is spread across three continents, and transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa, “to help Amazon\u2019s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands”, <\/em>also has access to Alexa users\u2019 geographic coordinates and can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees (who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program, which apparently did not prevent them from speaking off the record with Bloomberg).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And while there has yet to be any evidence that Amazon employees have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team who seem to have grown a coscience, expressed concern that Amazon which is fast becoming the world’s biggest monopoly across virtually every industry, was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device\u2019s owner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don\u2019t want to be found,\u201d said Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law\u2019s Communications and Technology Clinic, who noted that location data is more sensitive than many other categories of user information. Widespread access to location data associated with Alexa user recordings \u201cwould set up a big red flag for me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thousands Of Amazon Alexa Eavesdroppers Can Also Access Users’ Home Addresses Bloomberg has it in for Amazon these days. Two weeks after we finally got confirmation what everyone had known for so long, namely that an internal Amazon team numbering in the thousands was secretly listening in to Alexa users\u2019 commands without their prior knowledge, Bloomberg reported that the […]<\/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":[19178,83,25707,5570,765],"class_list":["post-45635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-alexa","tag-bloomberg","tag-eavesdropping","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45635","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=45635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45636,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45635\/revisions\/45636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}