Google and Amazon use smart speakers for 'surveillance,' top tech investor says
Google
and Amazon use smart speakers for 'surveillance,' top tech investor says
Tech investor John Borthwick doesn’t
mince words when it comes to how he perceives smart speakers from the likes of
Google and Amazon. The founder of venture capital firm Betaworks and
former Time Warner and AOL executive believes the information-gathering
performed by such devices is tantamount to surveillance.
“I would say that there's two or three layers sort of
problematic layers with these new smart speakers, smart earphones that are in
market now,” Borthwick told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer during an
interview for his series “Influencers.”
“And so the first is, from a consumer standpoint, user
standpoint, is that these, these devices are being used for what's — it's hard
to call it anything but surveillance,” Borthwick said.
“I personally believe that you, as a user and as somebody who
likes technology, who wants to use technology, that you should have far more
rights about your data usage than we have today,” Borthwick said.
Smart
assistants face a reckoning
The venture capitalist’s comments follow a string of
controversies surrounding smart assistants including Google’s Assistant,
Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, in which each company admitted that human
workers listen to users’ queries as a means of improving their digital
assistants’ voice recognition capabilities.
“They've gone to those devices and they've said, ‘Give us data
when people passively act upon the device.’ So in other words, I walk over to
that light switch,” Borthwick said. “I turn it off, turn it on, it's now giving
data back to the smart speaker.”
It’s important to note that smart
speakers from every major company are only activated when you use their
appropriate wake word. To activate your Echo speaker, for instance, you need to
say “Alexa” followed by your command. The same thing goes for Google’s
Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
The uproar surrounding smart speakers and their assistants
began when Bloomberg reported in April
that Amazon used a global team of employees and contractors to listen to users’
voice commands to Alexa to improve its speech recognition.
Google and Apple have since apologized, with Google halting the
practice, and Apple announcing that it will automatically opt users out of
voice sample collection. Users instead will have to opt in if they want to
provide voice samples to improve Siri’s voice recognition.
Amazon, for its part, has allowed users to opt out of having
their voice samples shared with employees, while Facebook said it has paused
the practice.
At issue is whether users were aware that employees of these
companies were listening. There’s also the matter of accidental activations,
which can result in employees hearing conversations or snippets of
conversations they might otherwise not have been meant to hear.
As for how such issues can be dealt with in the future,
Borthwick points to some form of tech regulation. Though he doesn’t offer
specifics, the VC says that users need to be able to understand how their data
is being used, and be able to take control of it.
“I think generally, it's about giving the users a lot more power
over the decisions that are being made. I think that's one piece of it,” he
said.
Editor’s note: AOL is owned by
Verizon Media, Yahoo Finance’s parent company.
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