Many people use smart home devices nowadays for its convenience, but do you what you’re losing in order to have such convenience?
You’ve bought your first smart speaker – Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Apple HomePod and you’re really excited to use it. You can speak to it just like a friend that not only talks just like a chatbot, but can turn on lights for you, change TV channels for you, will be able to add events to calender, play music, and many many more.
But do you know how much data does it collect about you every single day? In the name of listening to (or) waiting to the command we say – it records all that it can hear and those are being stored in the company’s servers.
It is scary, isn’t it? How do you feel if someone listens to what is happening in your home (aka private space) 24/7?
According to PCMag, Amazon’s Alexa Collects More of Your Data Than Any Other Smart Assistant. Check out the image below that shows what data are being collected.
Okay, so private data is being collected. But what do they do with it? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Well, Amazon says, “Data is retained when it serves a business purpose”. Google says, “maintain & improve services,” “develop new services,” and “provide personalized services, including content and ads,”.
Hmm, that’s it, right? “Business Purpose“.
Well, there’s more.
According to Dark Reading, Hackers can control smart speakers using inaudible sounds called Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan (NUIT). Yes, these smart speakers are vulnerable to cyber attacks pretty easily, and hackers (if they think) can control all the devices connected to the speaker. Some even use Siri to open doors, which is insane because they’re placing a lot of trust in these companies rather than themselves, which is not that good.
Yeah, it is a bit risky, but I love the convenience of controlling multiple devices using my voice. How can I do that, but a little bit safely?
It’s not that safe, but if you’re really interested in this, maybe you can try building one for yourself (if you’re into tech, btw). With the rise of AI tools and so many open source tools out there, it is pretty easy to build an AI Voice assistant, training it with custom data and integrating it into a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to make your own Voice Assistant.
Or, if you think that’s too much and you don’t have time to learn all these things, then go use Alexa or Google Home or Siri. But make sure you go to privacy settings and delete your data every single month and download your data to see what they’ve been collecting and if you’re okay with it.
But it is advisable not to link too many devices to these speakers.
Thank you for reading.
Be safe online!!!