Do smartspeakers post privacy risk?

One of the fastest growing tech in the recent past undoubtedly goes to the Smart speakers. In order to proceed, Amazon launched Echo with Alexa as a personal voice assistant, Google launched Google Home and recently Apple launched Homepod.

These are generally a wireless speaker that features smart features including Bluetooth, NFC, speakerphone and a voice control built into them. These speakers area single-unit wireless speakers, and have artificial intelligence (AI) from Amazon, Apple, Google built into them.

These smart speakers can do a lot of stuff including through our voice command. For example, you can ask them to play a song for you, you can ask it to set a timer, you can control your AV system and more. You need to trigger the speakers by it magic words -- 'OK Google’, 'Alexa’ or 'Hey Siri’ - and your smart speaker will prick its ears up and wait to hear your command.

However, this one the other side also comes with privacy risk as well. We have listed out 5 privacy invasions possible when you use smart speakers including Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod.

Always listening

One of the most known things is that smart speakers are always listening to our conversation. Until and unless you turn On the toggle for Mute, your smart speakers is always listening for the wake word. So your device processes all the audio it hears and deletes the running buffer of audio after few seconds. While not all the conversation you goes to servers, it sends the command to servers to processes it and then plays the answer.

Storage of data

When you are interacting with speakers, it stores the audio snippets and logs them into your account. If you want, you can hear all your previous interaction with the speakers by logging into your account. This data can be deleted somehow but you cannot eliminate the aggregated data stored on Google's or Amazon's servers. According to the company, they use it to improve the assistant.

Surrounding audios

These speakers not only collects your interaction but also ambient audio as well. This might record things that happen in your home including, what channels you are watching on TV, what sports you like, what pets you have, gender ratio in your household and more like this. Sounds creepy?

Law and orders

We all know about the NSA spying in the last few years following which, UK has passed a law that allows them to access all residents Internet histories from the Food Standards Agency to the Department for Work and Pensions. What if other countries headed towards the similar path?

Risk of Hacking

When it comes to Amazon Echo, you can order things through Amazon directly with the help of Alexa. This poses the huge risk as someone steals your device and they could spend hundreds of dollars on your credit card before you know it.