COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING
VOICE PRIVACY RULES NEEDED NOW, EXPERTS SAY
A growing throng of Americans revel in being able to call out “What’s the weather?” to their Amazon Echo, or “Is ‘ The Shawshank Redemption’ on?” to their Samsung SmartTV and have a weather report read out or the movie pop onto their screen.
But these first forays into a world where digital servants always listen for our commands raise red flags for privacy and security experts, who see too many ways it could all go horribly wrong.
“In our homes, there are all sorts of conversations that are going on and are meant to be personal and private,” said Lynn Terwoerds, executive director of the Executive Women’s Forum on Information Security and Risk Management.
Wednesday, she and others launched the Voice Privacy Industry Group at the RSA computer security conference. Their goal is to set a voice privacy agenda for developers “early on, when they’re starting to think about it, not later when they have to patch something that’s fundamentally broken,” she said.
Most voice-command devices listen for a “wake word” that tells them to start paying attention, such as “Alexa!” or “Hey, Siri.” Simple commands can be processed on the device while more complex requests are uploaded via wireless to the cloud, where they’re translated into text the program can understand and act upon.
The concern is that this trickle of helpful adjuncts could become a flood of invasive devices bent on listening, and learning, from everything we say around them.
“Which is why now is the time for setting privacy expectations,” said Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer for Cisco and founding member of the group.
It was initially an outgrowth of the Executive Women’s Forum, a professional organization for women in information security. The working group is open to both men and women, but “things that intimately affect our families” are a little more front and center for women, which is why a women’s group came to it first, Dennedy said.
Americans have grown inured to the idea that their computers are always tracking them. Search for a kitchen faucet and faucet ads seem to appear on every site you visit for days.
But could there come a day when talking about buying a faucet in the kitchen could be overheard by your TV in the living room, changing the types of commercials that show up when you’re watching your favorite program the next night?
That’s the type of scenario the group would like to get ahead of, while the list of voice-control devices is still short.
Today, the most widely deployed are Apple’s Siri, Google’s Hey Google, Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV and some Samsung Smart TVs.
They represent “an enormous sea change to our relationship with the computer. And this is where privacy comes into the mix,” said Kelly Fitzsimmons, cofounder of Custom Reality Services, a virtual-reality production company and also a part of the working group.
The aim isn’t to shut voice control down but to nudge it in the right direction. “We don’t want to kill the innovation cycle, but I care about whether my TV is lis- tening to me,” said Joyce Brocaglia of Alta Associates, an executive cyber security search firm who helped launch the group.
One concern has been that law enforcement might subpoena sound files recorded in a home when investigating a crime, or that they could be discoverable in a divorce proceeding.
So far no actual cases seem to have hit the courts, though “we are finding that evidence from voice technology can be quite valuable if the information leads to some kind of tracking mechanism that places a spouse at a different location than they might have claimed,” said Joslin Davis, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.