> The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying.
In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Only audio that includes and follows that word should ever exit the device to the network. That reduces the privacy risk to accidental triggers, which happen sometimes (but relatively rarely.)
I've been told by security experts that this is (or rather was, as of 2018) the behavior of Alexa. I'd like to believe that we live in a world where Amazon/Apple/Google respect privacy and won't change that behavior via a software update (and if they do, they will be smacked hard by regulators.) I'm not 100% convinced we do live in that world, unfortunately.
In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Only audio that includes and follows that word should ever exit the device to the network. That reduces the privacy risk to accidental triggers, which happen sometimes (but relatively rarely.)
I've been told by security experts that this is (or rather was, as of 2018) the behavior of Alexa. I'd like to believe that we live in a world where Amazon/Apple/Google respect privacy and won't change that behavior via a software update (and if they do, they will be smacked hard by regulators.) I'm not 100% convinced we do live in that world, unfortunately.