They’re Listening: A Paranoid Guide to Smart-Speaker Privacy
The demon boxes cater to your every need! How much should you trust them?
By Kaveh Waddell
Scrambling to deflate a privacy scandal, Facebook has quietly shelved an Amazon Echo–like home speaker it had been planning to release in May, Bloomberg reported last month. The company decided that now might not be the right time to ask to be invited into your living room. The unsaid reasoning: It’s one thing to give your data up to a tech company; it’s another to let one of its devices listen in on you all the time.
For now, three other companies’ home speakers rule the market. None of them is free of privacy pitfalls, either — that’s a given when you bring home an internet-connected microphone attached to a computer and a speaker — but one of the three does stand out when it comes to privacy and security.
Understanding why that is, and how the three companies’ home speakers deal with your data differently, requires taking a close look at what happens to a spoken request, from the moment it leaves your lips to the instant it’s deleted from a faraway server — if it’s ever deleted at all. It also demands a little bit of business voodoo to guess at what the companies are eventually going to do with all that data they’re…
