Is Big Sister Alexa listening to our private conversations?

Imagine an Orwellian futuristic sci-fi novel of a dystopian society totally monitored by the state, in every word, in every room of every house. It would be China on steroids, no room to voice a free opinion or speak a private word in case the listening devices were picking it up. And the government was run by one party with no choice in the matter and any dissent was immediately rooted out.

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Well it’s heading in that direction. We may not quite be China just yet but we in the west are beginning to see the arrival of the home listening device, and it’s called Alexa, among other things. Echo is another name, or Google Home. These are all devices now on sale to the public as a voice activated search engine or home AI in the new era of the IoT or internet of things. As everything becomes connected we are all finding it comes with a smoother user interface.

Now we can simply speak our command or request into our listening AI secretary and we get a reply spoken to us and the request fulfilled.

As you can imagine there are immediate alarm bells about having any listening device in your home to begin with. It turns out they were somewhat confirmed when evidence came to light that certain conversations spoken to the listening machines were also listened to by insiders.

It sounds more sinister than it is but it confirms all our suspicions about being listened to from behind some electronic device.

Just like with Facebook, our data can be harvested if someone has the intention. Apparently the companies who make the Alexa systems do occasionally harvest some of the spoken conversations people have had with Alexa in order to test it and improve the machine learning capacity. Sophia, as she might be known, the AI, is not only living in the cloud like an entity unto herself and teaching herself rapidly with each interaction.

She is also being assisted by humans who are hired in the hundreds to sit in offices all over the world, places like India, Romania, Boston and Costa Rica.

They sit for nine hours a day in shifts, listening to around 1000 conversations in a shift, in order to hear if Alexa correctly performed her listening capabilities and responded as an efficient product for customers. They try to improve her capabilities according to their data capturing.

The only problem is that the data they randomly captured to test and do a quality control just happens to be not only commands activated by the owners using the activation word “Awake” or “Alexa”, but also sometimes Alexa mistakes a sound for the activation command and records random conversation that you thought was completely private. And staff who listen to their random recordings are finding at least 100 out of 1000 recordings they listen to are such arbitrary recordings of private lives.

That’s 10%, which I would call very high, though I’m not surprised since it is new technology and the parameters of something going wrong are like those of a driverless car – considerable.

These may be small examples of odd loopholes in the system, but there are still concerns and they aren’t because staff sometimes hear weird or compromising stuff, but what is of more concern is the fact that these Alexa or Google Home devices can be so easily used to listen in on anyone’s life at any time. It may be like the camera on your laptop that may be at risk of being hacked to spy on you. Well Alexa is potentially just the tool to spy on everyone as the IoT on 5G comes to town. And for those customers voluntarily buying such home listening devices – and there are millions already all over the world – you can already be spied on.

We are not told about it, only random samples being taken to improve the product, but who’s to say there is not already a spying campaign on all the citizens?

The tech is certainly there now, it appears, and if they wanted to, the Secret Services could easily tap into records and retrieve our data just like they did with Facebook via Cambridge Analytica. This is a whole higher level of potential surveillance being put in place.

Let us know your thoughts on the matter.

• Would you use such a voice prompted AI secretary in your home like Alexa?

• Is this a potential Big Brother scenario where the state can listen in on our daily lives?

• What is the future of such neo–feudal government systems in our modern evolving society today?

With talk of the Chinese social credit score on its way to the west, this generation being born now might be the last to ever be born free.