If you have a digital assistant in your home, and you think you can maintain control of your privacy within the home, you probably don’t know that so-called “smart speakers” can activate not only when you give them an explicit voice command, but also when you utter expressions that have a certain assonance with the default keywords, thus risking to end up being heard several times during a day , and even when you’re not aware of it at all.
In fact, the discovery of Stephen Hall, editor of 9to5Google, who has been testing one of the many Android devices that users are used to using by activating them with the typical voice command “Ok Google”, and to his surprise the expert has learned that the voice assistant has been activated with as many as 17 different words that, although phonetically similar to the traditional command , however, they deviate lexically significantly, thus paving the way for any legitimate doubt as to whether and when such devices can “accidentally” activate.
In practice, during the experiment it was found that the digital assistant activated itself by pronouncing expressions that have little to do with Google, such as “Ok Hugo”, “Ok Boo Boo”, “Ok Frugal”, “Ok Dougal” and many others similar. Moreover, it emerges that among the expressions that work is usually present the word “ok”, which is far from specific to voice commands, being this widely used by the majority of people around the world (and not only by the English-speaking ones) in daily conversations as a nod of assent, so it also derives the concern of being able to unintentionally activate the smart speaker whenever this word is spoken before another short and particularly low tone.
And if anyone thinks this can happen only sporadically, it’s the results of research conducted by Northeastern University and Imperial College London, in which scholars have subjected smart devices to hours and hours of episodes of TV series and shows on Netflix, proving that they activate themselves when they shouldn’t have had up to 19 times a day , simply by “listening” to the television and not the voice of its owner.
Of course, concluding that all these fortuitous activations of voice assistants are merely the result of clumsy mistakes on the part of their developers may be all too superficial to underestimate the behemoths that are targeting the market for these devices, as the companies that design them always hire the best computer engineers and are devoting enormous resources to the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies to manage them. Just think, for example, that only Alibaba has just allocated an investment of 1.4 billion dollars to manage the Internet of Things of its smart speakers Tmall Genie.
Meanwhile, the digital assistant market is seeing unstoppable growth, and according to Juniper Research analysts’ forecasts, by 2024 the number of devices installed will reach 8.4 billion, even exceeding that of the world population, but by the end of this year there will be 4.2 billion voice assistants globally.
Among the main players in the technology market of voice assistants are of course Amazon, which in the first quarter of 2020 consolidates its primacy with a market share increasing from 21.5 to 23.5%, then Google that goes from 17.9 to 19.3%, and to follow Chinese companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi, although the latter in this period are penalized by a production drop due to the emergency of Coronavirus.
“But the gluttonous bite that explains this new gold rush of smart assistants, seems to be only partly the business related to the sales of the devices, as explained in recent days to the broadcast Le Iene the digital entrepreneur Marco Montemagno, who raised an additional reason for fierce competition between the tech giants, making a statement as trivial as illuminating: “When you do a search with your voice assistant maybe it’s not a Google anymore. , and this radically changes the research market, so everyone is trying to take a stand: it is like a veil between us and our reality”.”
Put simply, if until now users are used to searching for information about restaurants, holidays, and any other need or desire on search engines, with Google so far having made it the master in a position that will greatly influence consumer buying choices, in the near future things could change radically, and users may soon find themselves bypassing the well-known search engine , ordering what they want to buy directly to the voice assistant, but it is not said that it goes to search for Google results. On the contrary, each device typically uses its own database that can also provide results based on trade agreements made by the manufacturer with its partners, suggesting the purchase of their services and products.
Whether it’s true or not that “to think bad is sinful, but often it gets it right”, but it seems obvious that behind the sudden boom of digital assistants there are the huge slices of the market of the planetary advertising and marketing business to make so much throat to the giants of hi-tech, and it is in fact that you would expect in any case that the devices were compliant with the Gdpr responding also to the criteria of privacy by design and privacy by default. , according to which a controller must provide from the outset safeguards necessary to protect the rights of those concerned, making sure that “appropriate technical and organisational measures are put in place to ensure that only the personal data necessary for each specific purpose of treatment is treated by default”, and it is therefore desirable that European data protection authorities should be able to shed light on the many aspects that do not convince them of how the privacy of users would be actually protected.
In the meantime, to try to stem the pitfalls to our privacy arising from using digital assistants, users should become aware and think about it really well before putting one in the house. Then in case the desire to follow this new trend is really essential, it will be essential to follow the recommendations provided by the Data Protection Authority, carefully reading the information on the processing of personal data of the device you intend to purchase, providing only the information specifically necessary for the registration and activation of services and possibly use pseudonyms for accounts , all the more so when referring to minors, periodically deleting the history of recorded information, and above all turn off the digital assistant when we do not use it.
SOURCE: FEERPRIVACY