Tech investor says Google and Amazon are using their speakers to spy on you

Smart speakers are made up of a speaker and a digital assistant. Users can stream music, hear the latest news (weather, stock prices, and sports scores), control smart appliances, play virtual games, stream music, send texts, make phone calls, order items and much more. Amazon created the category with its Echo speakers that are equipped with the Alexa digital assistant. Another big player in this space is Google, whose smart speakers feature Google Assistant. Borthwick recently told Yahoo Finance for its Influencers series that he believes that Amazon and Google are using their speakers and AI-powered assistants to conduct surveillance on consumers. Borthwick says that some type of regulation might be needed. His concern is that consumers might not understand why tech companies are listening to recordings made of interactions between speaker users and digital assistants.

Consumers could be unnerved by recent reports revealing that companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google have hired companies or employees to go through recordings of customers interacting with their digital assistants. The tech firms say that this is done to make sure that the virtual helpers are understanding the tasks that they are asked to do, and are responding appropriately. But in the process of scoring the abilities of assistants like Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Google Assistant, the companies doing the review work are getting access to recordings that include personal information belonging to users without their consent.

Back in April, a report revealed how Amazon transcribes recordings made of customers asking Alexa to handle certain tasks. Amazon said that it uses these transcriptions to help Alexa understand slang, foreign languages and regional expressions. Last month, Apple suspended a program that used third party contractors who would listen to as many as 1,000 snippets of recordings a day of Apple customers speaking to Siri. The issue here is that Apple never received consent from its customers to pass along the clips to the contractors. And because Siri sometimes activates by accident, the contractors said that they have heard Apple device owners engaged in sex, or speaking to doctors about personal medical conditions. Apple said that the contractors could not determine the identity of those heard on these snippets. Future versions of iOS will allow users to opt-out of any Siri scoring program if Apple decides to resume it. Google has also stopped its program while Amazon allows its users to opt-out. Facebook also suspended a program that had employees listen to voice commands made by users of its Messenger app.