A study ensures that Alexa is spying on you at home

There are many devices that we have at home that have microphones. They have entered as if nothing had happened, without raising their voices and promising us that they will help us to do things around the house, or to entertain us, without much effort other than speaking to ask for anything. Smart speakers, connected screens, mobile phones, tablets, televisions, watches… practically any device has the ability to listen to us, but to what extent does it affect us?

The threat is confirmed

A study ensures that Alexa is spying on you at home

Amazon, in addition, already has behind it a small list of incidents on account of listening to the audio of its users, even in those moments when nothing is required of its assistant, Alexa, as happened with Ring doorbells and whose recordings were seen by some workers as a way, as they indicated, of quality control and improvement of the service. An excuse that has become recurrent when we want to say that we are very interested in what we talk about but, above all, what we want.

Now, a report by researchers at the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and Northeastern University claims that Amazon smart speakers “listen” and develop a “tracking” that ends with “profiling” of users. users to target their entire ad ecosystem on Echo speakers. This collection leads to “inferring what the interests of the users are” and, subsequently, focusing all the advertisements in that direction both within the devices and outside when we navigate through the web itself.

alexa funciones personalizadas

In this way, the belief that we all have that after talking about a topic that interests us, we end up seeing advertising wherever we go would be confirmed, which is not a good sign when it comes to keeping the internet giants, and companies advertising, away from us. Here, in the case of Amazon with its smart devices, it seems that there is a special link that has even been openly recognized by the company itself.

“Similar to what you would experience if you made a purchase on Amazon.com or requested a song through Amazon Music, if you asked Alexa to order paper towels or play a song on Amazon Music, the record of that purchase or playback of the song can inform about relevant ads being shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads,” said company spokeswoman Lauren Raemhild. “Customers may receive interest-based ads when they use premium ad-supported content, such as music, radio or streaming news.”

Your data, in the hands of many companies?

Another interesting piece of information from the analysis is that it reveals that the information they get from our Echo devices ends up not only in the hands of Amazon, but also in those of forty third-party companies specialized in advertising marketing: there is “strong evidence that smart speaker interactions are used for the purpose of ad targeting, and that this ad targeting involves significant data sharing between multiple parties .”

Ring DoorBell Video 2

For its part, from Amazon they pointed out that ” many of the conclusions of this investigation are based on inaccurate inferences or speculations of the authors, and do not accurately reflect how Alexa works”, for which he recalled that “we are not in the business of selling our customers’ personal information and we do not share Alexa requests with ad networks.”

The firm continues its statement indicating that “[…] in a similar way to what one would experience if they made a purchase on Amazon.es or requested a song through Amazon Music, if one asked Alexa to buy kitchen paper or play a song on Amazon Music, registration of such purchase or playback may serve to define relevant ads to display on Amazon or other sites where Amazon serves ads.Customers can opt out of receiving interest-based ads from Amazon at any time on our website. website”

As always, at this point it is time to dust off our faith and believe one or the other depending on what seems most convincing to us.