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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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Companies DO analyze what you say to smart speakers, but only after you have said "ok google, siri, alexa, etc." (or if they mistake something like "ok to go" as "ok google"). I am not aware of a single reputable source claiming smart speakers are always listening.
The reality is that analyzing a constant stream of audio is way less efficient and accurate than simply profiling users based on information such as internet usage, purchase history, political leanings, etc. If you're interested in online privacy device fingerprinting is a fascinating topic to start understanding how companies can determine exactly who you are based solely on information about your device. Then they use web tracking to determine what your interests are, who you associate with, how you spend your time, what your beliefs are, how you can be influenced, etc.
Your smart speaker isn't constantly listening because it doesn't need to. There are far easier ways to build a more accurate profile on you.
It's literally impossible for them to not be "analyzing" all the sounds they (perhaps briefly) record.
[Sound] --> [Record] --> [Analyze for keyword] --> [Perform keyword action] OR [Delete recording]
Literally all sounds, literally all the time. And we just trust that they delete them and don't send them "anonymized" to be used for training the audio recognition algorithms or LLMs.
The way that "Hey Alexa" or "Hey Google" works is by, like you said, constantly analysing the sounds they said. However, this is only analyzed locally for the specific phrase, and is stored in a circular buffer of a few seconds so it can keep your whole request in memory. If the phrase is not detected, the buffer is constantly overwritten, and nothing is sent to the server. If the phrase is detected, then the whole request is sent to the server where more advanced voice recognition can be done.
You can very easily monitor the traffic from your smart speaker to see if this is true. So far I've seen no evidence that this is no longer the common practice, though I'll admit to not reading the article, so maybe this has changed recently.
If they were to listen for a set of predefined product-related keywords as well, they could take note of that and send that info inconspicuously to their servers as well without sending any audio recordings. Doesn't have to be as precise as voice command recognition either, it's just ad targeting.
Not saying they do that, but I believe they could.