Recent years have shown an increasing number of smart speakers purchased for consumer use (Fisher, 2019). These handy devices allow you access to various commands and features via voice activation. However, the devices are not without controversy. What started with advertisements triggering the device’s functionality to purchase goods off popular e-tailers like Amazon, through command words, (Sweney, 2018) later led to various accusations of infringing on people’s personal lives, with disconcerting stories about how the device eavesdropped on and recorded personal conversations, to later share with others (Shaban, 2018).
The latter point has led to the recent filing of the Automatic Listening Exploitation Act (Govtrack, 2019), which, if passed, would fine companies $40k for each unauthorized recording performed by the smart home device that they produced. The act seems to bring a heavy financial incentives to companies in order to prevent them from acting without their user’s permission. The bill also allows customers to demand their recordings are deleted from the company’s archives.
The bill requires:
‘’(i)first providing to the user of the smart speaker when the speaker is first set up for use a clear and conspicuous notice, set off from other text in any user agreement, of the specific purpose or purposes described in subparagraph (A);
(ii)first obtaining the express consent of the user for that specific purpose; and
(iii)permitting the user of the smart speaker to require the deletion of any recording or transcript of any speech or sound captured by a smart speaker of such user at any time.’’ (Govtrack, 2019)
It rapidly becomes clear that the potential effectiveness of the bill depends on how consent is expressed, and looking at exemptions (Govtrack, 2019) such as ‘’improving the speech recognition and natural language understanding of the voice-user interface’’, it seems that these companies will have a generous amount of freedom to record and exploit user audio data.
The majority of people seem to be of the opinion that one should not purchase a smart-home device unless he/she is comfortable with the potential of being recorded; one has to trade security for convenience. A terms of service agreement that we see for many other services that leverage consumer data would be easily implemented. However, it would introduce a new gray area represented by all the other people in your personal life that might visit your house. What happens when you gave consent, but your family members did not? It would be difficult to argue that everybody entering a space has to check for smart home devices and otherwise remove themselves from the area. It will be very interesting to see how people continue to interact with these devices, and whether they will become a new socially unaccepted items like the first smart glasses (Gibbs, 2014), or whether they remain the cool centerpiece of the modern home.
References
Fisher, B. (2019). NPR Report: Smart Speakers See 78% Increase YOY. NPR. Retrieved from:
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/682946406/npr-report-smart-speakers-see-78-increase-yoy?t=1569155049112
Sweney, M. (2018). Hey Alexa, is it true a TV advert made Amazon Echo order cat food? The guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/14/amazon-alexa-ad-avoids-ban-after-viewer-complaint-ordered-cat-food
Shaban, H. (2018). An Amazon Echo recorded a family’s conversation, then sent it to a random person in their contacts, report says. The Washington post. Retrieved from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24/an-amazon-echo-recorded-a-familys-conversation-then-sent-it-to-a-random-person-in-their-contacts-report-says/
Govtrack. (2019). H.R. 4048: Automatic Listening Exploitation Act of 2019. Govtrack. Retrieved form:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr4048
Govtrack. (2019). H.R. 4048: Automatic Listening Exploitation Act of 2019. Govtrack. Retrieved form: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr4048/text/ih#link=2_a_2_A&nearest=H43EE88363990461089655A9E19FB921B
Gibbs, S. (2014). Google Glass review: useful – but overpriced and socially awkward. The guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/google-glass-review-curiously-useful-overpriced-socially-awkward
The authorities desire to regulate this industry is more than appropriate. Having a “big brother” at home is inherently risky regarding data privacy. Companies’ temptation to capitalize on such sophisticated and abundant customer data is rational and obvious. Users of these products are highly exposed to opportunistic misuse of personal data.
However automatic listening products are ardous to regulate in my opinion. How far can the authorities reach out into companies’ databases? Where do we draw the line between legitimate government supervision and protecting confidential business secrets? And how do governments create a sustainable mechanism for monitoring unauthorized recordings? Building a legitimate and effective monitoring system is probably costly or even impossible. If only consumer reported cases are investigated, we are not too much ahead. Why would customers notice more if the company violates data protection agreements?
Blockchain might be a sustainable and effective solution in the long term. If all the voice recordings are required to be stored on publicly available database, users would be able to check all the recordings made by their devices. Blockchain enables transparent but private data storage. The device owners would have exclusive rights to open their data files with their private keys, and at the same time, it would not be possible to extract data from devices into any other database. In this scenario governments would only have to enforce voice recording providers to use blockchain but not investigating their internal data architectures. And customers could easily check if only authorized audio was recorded.
This is of course a long term solution blockchains’ transaction speed and scalability has to significantly increase to make the solution feasible. At the same time, this BC use case might incentives further technology developments.
Cheers,
Balint
Thanks Yvanca for this interesting blog post.
In my opinion, it is justified to make unauthorized recording punishable. New technologies like these could have a much broader impact than people can initially imagine. I believe it is not merely a trade-off between convenience and privacy respect. Once such smart home devices become socially accepted, one might enter any room or space with a possibility of being recorded. I believe it is crucial for users of smart home appliances to delete a certain recording.
However, I would like to point out advantageous applications that smart home devices could have. For example, a smart home device could call an alarm number once it notices a dangerous situation, like domestic violence.