Somebody Is Listening.

• Author: Markuson, Daniel
• Position: UNDER THE MICROSCOPE - Smart speaker

SMART SPEAKERS may be quite popular, but they do engender certain vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to privacy. For instance, almost half of users did not know that their recordings were stored permanently and thus did not take any preventative action.

Smart speakers take note of everything we ask them to do or search, and that is how we create a portrait of ourselves for companies that manufacture those devices. The data they gather is stored permanently and later helps companies to sell even more products or help other marketers to target their audiences. So, the real price we pay for smart speakers is our privacy and security.

Smart speakers can be found in more than 50% of American households and are employed equally by both sexes. The shareability of this device also explains why it is widely utilized by seniors, as it is not uncommon for people to move in with their children once they get older.

What should we be concerned about? First of all, it is important to know that smart speakers record every command we give them if we leave the default settings. The recordings usually are stored on the device and then shipped off to the company's cloud servers for processing. As many users do not change the default settings, manufacturers have full control of the recordings and can use them in several ways, such as to improve the quality of service, further develop AI technologies, or build users' advertising profiles to sell to marketers. Building a customer's profile puts the user's privacy in question.

Smart speakers' passive listening, which always is on, also makes customers vulnerable. Passive listening results in accidental recordings when some words are misheard as activation phrases (like "Okay good" instead of "Okay Google").

Apart from businesses, our data is valuable to cybercriminals. Unfortunately, no security system is 100% secure, thus businesses get their users' data leaked all the time. In 2019, Google reported the leak of 1,000 smart speaker recordings. Some 153 of those were "conversations that never should have been recorded" because the activation phrase "Okay Google" was not given.

The main vulnerability of these speakers is that they usually are connected to multiple devices to control...