Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

Alexa, stop recording me: Bill would limit eavesdropping by smart speaker makers

By
amazon echo plus 2nd gen
Rich Shibley/Digital Trends

Alexa is apparently listening a little too closely for some people’s comfort. It was recently revealed that Amazon employees can listen to recordings from owners of Alexa devices. Now, California wants to take action to limit that type of intrusion.

Lawmakers in California have introduced the Anti-Eavesdropping Act, Assembly Bill (AB) 1395, which would limit how companies that make smart speakers and voice assistants can collect and save recordings. Under the proposed rule, companies like Amazon, Google, Apple and others would only be able to store recordings when users have given clear and written consent. That means the cache of recordings that Amazon and other companies often use to fine-tune its algorithms would shrink considerably unless people willingly allowed their conversations with voice assistants to be stored.

Recommended Videos

“Recent revelations about how certain companies have staff that listen in to private conversations via connected smart speakers further shows why this bill is necessary to protect privacy in the home,” Republican Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, the bill’s author, said in a statement according to the Mercury News.

Related

Should the bill pass, it could present a considerable hindrance to Amazon, Google, and the many other companies that rely on data and conversations collected from voice assistants. While it’s possible to delete recordings of conversations with voice assistants, those recordings are made by default. Under the new law, the voice assistants would not store that information unless and until a user gave permission to do so.

The companies that are being targeted by the bill are likely to oppose it. While Amazon and Apple have yet to publicly comment on the proposed law, a spokesperson for Google told the Mercury News that the company believe “the combination of strong and balanced regulations, with products that are designed with privacy in mind, will help provide individuals with confidence that they’re in control of their personal information.”

California isn’t the first state to try to place limits on these practices. Illinois attempted to pass a law that would have made it illegal for devices to remotely record audio without notifying the owner. Google and Amazon lobbied against that legislation.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
AJ Dellinger
AJ Dellinger
Contributor
AJ Dellinger is a freelance reporter from Madison, Wisconsin with an affinity for all things tech. He has been published by…
The war between PC and console is about to heat up again
Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast sitting on a desk.

There's no question that consoles are increasingly becoming more like PCs, but thanks to Nvidia, it appears that the opposite may be taking place too.

According to a new report by Wccftech, Nvidia is working with its partners to create a new ecosystem for gaming on small form factor (SFF) PCs. When it comes to Nvidia, many of us think of some of the best graphics cards that are as powerful as they are massive, like the RTX 4090. However, Nvidia is planning to flip that narrative and set its sights on an unexpected target.

Read more
Buying a Steam Deck has never been cheaper
Steam Deck over a pink background.

Valve is serving up huge price cuts on the Steam Deck, but there's a catch -- the consoles are refurbished. Part of the Certified Refurbished Steam Deck program, these handhelds have been fixed up by Valve to reportedly run like new -- and they're significantly cheaper. You can save up to $90, but is this too good to be true? It doesn't have to be.

Buying refurbished devices and hardware can be scary, but when the goodies come directly from the manufacturer, it becomes less risky. This is the case with Valve, which is now selling all three models of the LCD Steam Deck, refurbished and at a price cut. If this sounds good, you can now grab the base model for $279 instead of $349 ($70 savings), while the 256GB NVMe model costs $319 instead of $399 when purchased new. Lastly, the top handheld in the lineup with 512GB of storage costs just $359 instead of $449, which is $90 in savings.

Read more
AMD’s upcoming APUs might destroy your GPU
AMD CEO Lisa Su holding an APU chip.

The spec sheets for AMD's upcoming APU lineups, dubbed Strix Point and Strix Halo, have just been leaked, and it's safe to say that they're looking pretty impressive. Equipped with Zen 5 cores, the new APUs will find their way to laptops that are meant to be on the thinner side, but their performance might rival that of some of the best budget graphics cardsĀ -- and that's without having a discrete GPU.

While AMD hasn't unveiled Strix Point (STX) and Strix Halo (STX Halo) specs just yet, they were leaked by HKEPC and then shared by VideoCardz. The sheet goes over the maximum specs for each APU lineup, the first of which, Strix Point, is rumored to launch this year. Strix Halo, said to be significantly more powerful, is currently slated for a 2025 release.

Read more