In the 21st century people really started to worry about their privecy, as with the development of IT sphere more and more malicious codes and eavesdropping systems are involved to track our lives.
Nowadays smart speakers like Amazon Echo,
Amazon Echo Dot,
Sonos One,
JBL Link 20,
Google Home
and so on are becoming rather popular, as it has many usfull functions, which make our lives easier: answer questions, cotrole smart home gadgets, play music, search information etc.
Lets look at the pie chart below. It reflects that 21 persent of customers use smart speaker less often than they did at the beggining.
And next diagram shows why.
We can conclude that these 21% now use smart speaker less frequantly because they worry about personal date. And as it turned out not in vain.
October 20, security researchers claimed that Amazon and Google speakers have several desein flows, which can be used in eavesdropping and voice phishing.
To prove it several reaserches were held at Security Research Labs, a hacking research collective and consulting think tank, situated in Berlin. They found out that developers could create malicious apps for the Amazon and Google platforms to turn the smart speakers into smart spies. It was estimated that even after finishing using smart speaker, it was still recording voice, and as a result collecting personal data from users, including passwords, and eavesdropping.
“Consumers need to be aware that they are sending data to third parties when using voice apps,” explained SRL researcher Karsten Nohl. “These apps do not need to be installed on the device, but instead are invoked through phrases that the app developer chooses.”
“Hence, users might not be aware they are using the services of a third party,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The smart spies hacks add urgency to this situation since they allow app developers to listen in on users after the app has supposedly stopped running.”
Amazon and Google always care about their customers privecy, so after Being alert about such a problem both companies blocked the particular one smart speaker platform and put changes in place to reject or block any skill exhibiting the nasty behavior of the researchers’ app.
“It’s important that we continue to work with the security community to protect our customers,” the Amazon spokesperson said.” We have a dedicated team focused on certifying skills and ensuring the safety and security of our customers.”
Amazon and Google also added a new function for the safety of their customers, which allows users to delete everything smart speaker has recorded, as well as ask it what it heard and why it responded in a certain way.
Do you think Amazon and Google managed to solve this privecy issue or personal dater of their customers is still not safe?
Links:
https://www.technewsworld.com/story/Smart-Speaker-Apps-Caught-Snooping-Around-Homes-86309.html
https://marketingland.com/privacy-issues-may-be-hurting-smart-speaker-market-growth-263199
“Hey bug. Tell my FBI agent to log off my RuneScape account and order me my favorite pineapple pizza.”
In my humble opinion, the smart home systems must work pre-conditionally, meaning that they will learn our behaviour and do what we would normally do without us saying anything, maybe some small adjustments. I know, I know – we are just not there yet. It wil take an immense amount of resources and research. And when it comes to security of such things – oh boy, I really do hope that my CIA agent doesn’t know what I searched that day. ;P