To use Alexa, you have to trust Amazon

At Wednesday's event on the material, Amazon wanted to make sure you knew that it valued your privacy. "We are investing in privacy in all areas," said Dave Limp, Manager of Hardware and Services. "Confidentiality can not be an afterthought for the devices and services we offer to our customers. It must be fundamental and integrated from the beginning for every piece of hardware, software and service we create. "

To prove its relevance, the company has introduced a new set of privacy features, each offering users a little more control. A new shutter will electronically disconnect the camera to Echo Show 5. A separate function allows you to define "privacy zones", in which you will not be able to record or watch live part of the camera view. Another setting, scheduled for the month of November, stops recording the Ring camera when you are at home. A host of new Alexa skills will allow you to directly monitor the recordings and even set a phasing out. It's a series of serious features designed to convince you that Amazon is seriously thinking about the impact of its smart speakers and cameras on the protection of privacy.

But everyone was not convinced. At the same event, Amazon also offered us new ways to install networked microphones in almost everything we own: our glasses, our alarm clocks, even our jewelry. It was a total push for more Alexa in more places – a troubling thought if you are concerned about the invading nature of the ever-plugged microphones.

After months of growing concern over police partnerships with the Amazon Ring affiliate, privacy advocates were reluctant to point out the contradiction. "That's what Amazon does," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future. "They make empty statements to sell their products and then continue to create a goal of for-profit surveillance without supervision or accountability."

On the surface, this might seem like bad timing. Amazon has been working on these products for a long time – and the launch comes after months of escalating privacy scandals around the very idea of ​​a voice-based personal assistant. All major vendors have been forced to rely on contractors – real human beings who listen to your voice assistant's messages for verification purposes – and none have had good answers to confidentiality issues.

Apple was even forced to change its entire data retention model by adopting a default opt-out option for Siri records, which Amazon chose not to offer. Clearly, this was not the best time to launch a massive expansion of your voice assistant program.

But the problem goes much further than bad timing. Voice assistants (especially those who do not rely on hardware, like Alexa) offer their customers a basic contract: accept the cost of privacy protection associated with the use of a microphone in your home. cloud servers. This offer is known to all users of Facebook or Google. Alexa is not something you buy with money. It's almost always for free, with products that have other, more benign goals, like speakers and screens. This can make compromises more subtle than with a Facebook login account or a Gmail account, but the underlying transaction is the same: data for convenience.

Like any good seller, Amazon has focused more on the benefits than on the cost, which means that the recent revelations have been a surprise. On a technical level, it is not surprising that a voice assistant can not be fully automated and that human beings need to listen to improve the system. But Amazon and other companies never clearly explained this aspect of the transaction, so customers simply did not know it.

The campaign yesterday for the protection of privacy seems to have as main objective to convince the users of Amazon, aware of these new concerns and responding to them. If you are freaked out that Alexa may not be able to hear a word of waking and start recording, she will give you a command that will allow you to check this. If you are concerned about the multiplication of voice record catalogs installed on an Amazon server, they will give you the means to delete them. In the fast-paced school of technology ethos, that's how progress happens. You release a product, objections appear and you correct the objections. It's a bit messy, but as long as you take into account the concerns of your customers, you should find yourself in the right place – or at least you think so.

But privacy is more than just a set of features. Accepting Alexa at home (or in your glasses), is to believe that Amazon does not take advantage of the data you give it. In short, you have to trust them. Whenever Alexa develops into a new field, greater trust is required – and each time the service fails, that trust becomes difficult to maintain. Seen in this light, new privacy protections may be too few and too late.