Alexa, Are You Listening?

I hope so.  And I hope not.  We have an Amazon Echo in our home.  When I got it I thought it would be interesting to see if would be useful to have her around to offload some of the unpleasant tasks we're forced to do in our everyday lives.  You know, things like turning on the two lamps we have in our living room.  Or finding out if Keith Richards is still alive.  Or determining whether it's cold outside. Or finding out what time it is.  Glancing at my wristwatch has become such a burden these days, you know.

We welcomed Alexa into our home and linked her to my Amazon account within a few minutes.  Great, now I can order a roll of paper towels without ever getting out of bed.  Amazon says that soon I'll be able to order cat litter with Alexa and a drone will show up with it in about 15 minutes.  Yes, we are now in the twenty-first century and the cats are very excited about it.

For those of you who haven't yet experienced Alexa, I'll tell you how she works.  Echo is the name of the device itself.  It is a black cylinder about 10 inches tall and 4 inches in diameter.  It has a speaker and a bunch of directional microphones built in.  You plug it into an outlet for power and then it connects to the Amazon mothership through your home wi-fi network.  Alexa is a service running in some remote data center at Amazon that interprets your voice commands and does useful things for you.  We'll see about that.

To use Alexa, you "wake her up" by saying her name.  "Alexa, what time is it?" or "Alexa, is Keith Richards still alive?"  When Alexa hears her name she knows that whatever you say next is intended for her.  You can enable her different features through a web site.  These features are called skills and there are a lot of them.  There are skills to tell you the weather forecast, order a pizza, tell you today's news headlines, play Jeopardy, adjust your thermostat, play a Pandora station, tell you a useless fact about cats, and many other activities.  New skills are constantly being added by Amazon and other developers with a lot of time on their hands.  Many companies have written Alexa skills to let you access their products more easily by using just your voice.

According to Amazon, Alexa  learns about your voice and speech patterns over time in order to provide better accuracy.  In fact, you can go on the web site and start a program to train her to interpret your voice better.  We didn't do that and it shows.  Sometimes when we ask her for the time of day, she might respond with the seven day weather forecast for Vancouver, Washington or maybe the number of ounces in a quart.  We haven't spent much time training our Alexa, but she's supposed to be smart, right?  We think that eventually she'll figure it out on her own.

After Alexa had been with us for a few days, I started to wonder how she really works.  I signed up with Amazon for a developer's account, which gave me access to a bunch of programming interfaces and sample code. If you want to develop an Alexa skill to do something you need to sign up as a developer.  Amazon then provides all the information you need to interface your programs to the Alexa service and add voice control to them.

I played with the Alexa interface on and off for a few days and even wrote some code for a Rasberry PI computer to access the Alexa service.  It was during this exercise that I realized that Alexa was always listening to us, waiting to hear her name so she could take some kind of action.  I began to get a little concerned about our privacy.  Was Alexa streaming all the things we said in the privacy of our home to an Amazon data center somewhere and storing it for later analysis?  

If you go to the web site that lets you configure your Alexa, you can look at all the commands you have ever issued to her and see her responses.  I started to wonder if she was secretly storing all the other stuff she heard us talking about somewhere in the Amazon cloud.  Was Donald Trump listening to our lively discussions about the presidential election on his Alexa somewhere?  Was some obscure government agency slowly and silently building dossiers on Tanya and I?  Does my mother know how often I use profanity?  Does the grocery store know what we're planing to make for dinner?  Does Jackson Galaxy know when our cats are fighting?  

When you think about it, there's a lot of information exchanged within the walls of your home that you just wouldn't want outsiders to know about.  It's not that we're doing anything bad or illegal.  It's just that we don't know these people and we would prefer that they didn't know everything about our political views, our social circle, our favorite kind of beer, or our bathroom habits.  These are the things you might share with those people who are closest to you, but not the readers of The New York Times or a bureaucrat sitting at his desk somewhere in a government building.  

And what about hackers?  Some of these people are smart.  Very smart.  And they are determined to get information about us.  Has Amazon implemented safeguards to be absolutely sure that hackers don't learn all about us just by listening to our conversations?  That would be a monumental task.

So there you have it.  Amazon has claimed that they don't provide the information Alexa hears to third parties.  Do you believe them?  In the age of Trump it has become acceptable to answer direct questions like that with half-truths and outright lies.  Our elected officials are boldly doing bad things to us with impunity.  To be sure, they have always done bad things to us, but now they don't even have to hide it.

So, if you're thinking about getting your own Alexa, keep these things in mind.  We still have our Alexa, but I'm becoming less comfortable with her presence in our home every day.