Users have woken up to their non-existent privacy after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, whose fallout will be felt for a long time to come. It isn’t surprising that they would now be worried about what a smart speaker could be listening to or what data it would gather from inside one’s home. It’s a valid worry, though we have our phones in our hands and those too have microphones.
The companies that make smart speakers say it only wakes up when a key wake word is called and that does seem to be the case.
As you can see from the companion apps, every query made is logged. In Alexa’s app, you can give feedback on whether a query was handled correctly or not and access other options from the card that each query creates. You can also delete these cards. You can do the same with Google Home’s app and your Activity section.
The queries are used to ‘make the product better’ for each user by personalising services and to improve the services themselves. For now, Google and Amazon are not pushing third party ads on their speakers, so these are not going to be listening in to your family’s private conversations and picking up keywords to show you ads. The companies are in fact keen on staying as unintrusive and safe as possible otherwise their initial users will run before they even become common. Of course, nothing can be said about what kind of threats could unfold if some third party were to hack into these systems. After all, Google’s services have been hacked before. But this isn’t specific to smart speakers and applies to most tech products we use.
No, the potential dangers of smart speakers come from elsewhere and are for now, in the future, simply because our homes are not yet connected enough. Only in some places in the world are homes equipped with thermostats, heating or cooling, smart locks, cameras, etc, that are connected and work with smart speakers. But in India as well, these IoT products are now increasing. You can get smart lights such as the Philips Hue bulbs, smart switches and kits such as from Oakter, and other such products are in the making.
Connected air purifiers, weighing scales, geysers, air conditioners are all beginning to trickle in. And that’s where we need to worry about whether someone mischievous can use a smart speaker to tamper with our homes.
But that time is not here yet, which leaves time for IoT security to be possibly strengthened.