Shock, horror. If you use a voice assistant to help you with tasks, your privacy has been invaded. But, unlike other privacy scandals, this is one the owners of smart speakers should have seen coming.
Led by Amazon’s Alexa (which runs through its Echo speakers), the voice assistant market has exploded in recent years as smart speakers have popped up in homes all over the world. All smartphone owners can also use Google Assistant (on Android) or Siri on iPhones and other Apple products, without the need for a standalone gadget like Echo. Facebook has an opt-in service that transcribes voice chats — which has been suspended in Europe after this audio was "mistakenly" sent to human contractors. The power of voice assistants has been trumpeted by the companies that offer them, but it turns out all of the big tech firms, despite saying they don’t listen in, actually do.
In the past few months it has emerged that the software that runs these voice assistants, like all software, needs help from humans with that most particular of human problems: understanding other humans.
The premise is simple: instead of picking up a smartphone, you merely tell your smart speaker to perform the task for you. Typically, these are simple things like giving you a weather forecast, reading news headlines, googling information or setting reminders. To cue the smart speaker that you’ve got a request, you say the activation phrase, which, depending on the service, is "Hey Alexa/OK Google/Hey Siri".
The only problem is that those speakers are always listening. The makers argued this was to build up voice recognition systems, but there are innumerable problems with that. The manufacturers assured their customers that no-one else was listening and that those recordings would stay secret. Except they lied.
All major makers have used people to check the quality of their voice recognition, a process called "grading", often without users’ knowledge.
In arguably the most shocking instance, contractors hired by Apple heard recordings of people having sex, their confidential medical information and even drug deals, according to a whistleblower’s account in The Guardian. "There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data."
Apple has since apologised and stopped the process, while Google has suspended it in Europe. Amazon has an option to opt out of having recordings reviewed.
This isn’t going to be the end of this scandal. Voice assistants will probably always need human grading to check whether they are doing their job properly. It’s yet another trade-off of privacy for convenience. I don’t think it’s worth it.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine (stuff.co.za)