It’s been a busy seven days for the Alexa smart home. In the space of a week, we’ve seen the launch of a new Echo Show 5, Amazon turning on the ability to delete Alexa recordings by voice and the surfacing of a patent for an assistant that listens to everything you say.
The Amazon Echo Show 5 is a neat-looking 5.5-inch Alexa smart display, designed for ‘bedsides and desks’ with a HD camera (plus camera shutter), that will go on sale in June for £80. The new privacy feature and the patent, meanwhile, have both been overblown in different directions.
Alexa users can now say “Alexa, delete everything I said today” and soon they’ll be able to say “Alexa, delete what I just said.” The ‘today’ function resets at midnight and if you make the request at say 7pm, Amazon will delete recordings up until 7pm. This is not a new function for Alexa – the option was already there to delete individual recordings or by day/week/month etc in the Alexa app and buried deep in Amazon’s settings. It’s the ability to do this via voice that’s new.
Here’s something Amazon can do right now – it’s not a technical fix, it’s a product decision: remove the need to opt in to the ‘today delete’ function. If you want to start using a third party Alexa skill, it’s auto enabled so that you can simply ask Alexa to open the skill via voice – you don’t need to dig into the Alexa app and download it.
It's not so with ‘today delete’. You have to enable this in the settings first, a hurdle sure to vastly reduce the proportion of users who actually implement it. Amazon has said that the ‘opt in’ requirement is there because anyone, including guests in your home, could speak the command to your Alexa device. This is not a real problem that anyone cares about.
Another quick fix: when we opened up the Alexa app and go to ‘Routines’, the feature that allows you to combine multiple actions and smart home controls and that Amazon has just updated to add 'sleep sounds', the ‘delete today’ feature does not appear in the ‘Device settings’ menu. So if I say “Alexa, good night” I could program the system to turn all the smart lights off, turn on Do Not Disturb and tell me tomorrow’s weather, for instance, but I can’t add on the ‘delete today’ action here. So instead of setting it up once, the voice delete would become a daily chore. The kind of thing the Echo is supposed to eliminate.
We asked Amazon if it has data on how many people have ever deleted their Alexa recordings so far, and how many people regularly delete their recordings, but it declined to share any numbers.
There are big reasons why Amazon doesn't want to make it too easy for you to delete the utterances it records. Beatrice Geoffrin, director of Alexa Trust at Amazon, told us via email that voice recordings “help Alexa better understand a customer’s speech patterns, voice and requests, and deleting them may degrade their experience.”
It is sticking to the strategy of offering us the ability to delete individual recordings – transcripts are also deleted from its “main systems” though it appears that these hang around longer in total on “subsystems” – or recordings via a time period. It’s an either/or between the magic of Alexa convenience and privacy in your own home. This doesn’t match up to how real people think about privacy. No-one bemoans the fact that Amazon was listening to the goings-on in their living room on Wednesday specifically, they’re more likely to be concerned that business ideas, health problems and parenting conversations have been recorded, stored and monetised.
Amazon offers no transparency around how it slices and dices our personal recordings for use within its own businesses and no granular controls for a customer who, say, has zero qualms about Amazon learning everything about their music, movie, shopping and grooming habits but balks at the idea of Amazon storing information on health or relationships. The update from Amazon follows reports from Bloomberg that Amazon workers have been able to listen to what you tell Alexa.
Amazon’s other privacy announcement this week was its new Privacy Hub, designed to explain what Amazon does with our recordings, but it doesn’t offer anything we didn’t already know. The GDPR-on-steroids dream would be access to an easy to understand personal profile, right there in the Alexa app, showing what data Amazon currently stores on us and what valuable insights has inferred from that data. That’s unlikely to happen but there’s a lot of fertile ground between being able to delete that day’s recording via voice and full blown transparency.
Amazon execs have hinted that we should expect more changes to privacy controls for Alexa in the near future. Geoffrin says “we have and will continue to build our cloud services, device hardware, and the Alexa customer experience with privacy in mind. This includes introducing new features.”
Read more: What can Alexa do? The best Alexa skills and commands
The Amazon patent which BuzzFeed reported on this week was filed in January and details a system of pre-wake word speech processing i.e. giving Alexa the ability to listen in for speech in which the Alexa/Echo/Computer wake word comes in the middle or end of a command. The patent outlines that this processing would be done locally and most of the headlines on this have sounded the alarm on Amazon doing R&D on listening to everything we say. Anyone with an Alexa device who has ever seen it light up when the TV is on, or checked their history of recordings, knows that the alarm you might feel about this patent should, in fact, be directed to existing Alexa functionality. In other words, it's best to assume it's always listening (even if it isn't).
There is always the ‘just don’t buy one’ argument. DIY alternatives for controlling the smart home, such as Home Assistant, already exist and Apple’s HomePod is an option though much more expensive than an Echo. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence predicted last year, in the wake of the Facebook Portal, that new paid for, privacy focused assistants, costing “a dollar or two” a month, could emerge to fill the gap.
But millions of people already have Amazon Echo and third-party Alexa devices in their homes. Should these smart speakers have come with a warning label about Amazon’s current and future uses of voice recording and transcript data? Probably. Is it simply too late to shift the extent of the transaction between user and Amazon? Probably not.
With ‘delete today’ and the camera shutter, Amazon is, like Google with its privacy messaging around the new Nest Hub Max, trying to widen the appeal of always listening devices to new types of customers. With the likes of Margrethe Vestager and Elizabeth Warren on the hunt from the regulation side, and moves such as the recent acquiring of mesh networking startup eero, Amazon will have to do more, radically more and soon, on user privacy, data and how it relates to its business model if it wants its voice technology to become a default mode of interaction for millions more people.
And if you’re a concerned Echo owner, it seems that now is the time to tell Amazon what you’d like to see and what you wouldn’t like it to store. Geoffrin says that Amazon pays attention to both product reviews on its store and customers who contact them directly and that Alexa teams will listen to customer feedback specifically on this feature in order to improve it. Let’s test that out.
One more idea: if Amazon needs recordings for speech patterns and so on, why not give customers the ability to auto delete their recordings every 30 days? We’re being slightly facetious, of course, but if Amazon is serious about privacy and chooses not to offer more granular, category-by-category controls, it needs to do more in 2019. (Web browsing data can now be automatically deleted from Google). A monthly auto delete could be set up in the Alexa app rather than putting the onus on users to remember to speak a command once a month. Until then, the internet has already come to the rescue, with the suggestion of setting up a Google Home to speak the “delete everything I said today” command to Alexa. Perfect.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
