Is Your Smart Home Spying on You?

It should be noted that advertisers don’t know you by name. Rather, all your info is anonymized. But many people still feel the practice is, well, creepy.

Smart speakers have another reason to record and process what you say: It helps make the experience better over time with your Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod or Google Home device. The data can make your interaction with the digital assistant more accurate and faster as it learns how you say certain words.

Data can be shared among devices, too

Google Assistant can be found built into devices other than its Nest series of smart speakers. The Harman Kardon Citation One MKIII was introduced in 2022.

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Recordings of your voice also personalize your device, allowing it to give better suggestions and answers. If you train your smart speaker to recognize the voices in your household, it gives you custom information. Ask what’s on tap for the day and hear only your specific calendar entries instead of the whole family’s.

Your speakers also can use the information you give them to target ads you will see on your computer or phone. If you ask your Google Home speaker to order dog food, you may find pet nutrition ads when you launch your Google Chrome browser.

Smart speakers themselves are actually quite dumb. The hardware itself is a conduit for uploading your queries over the internet to servers that process your requests and send the responses back down to the speaker.

And your speakers are not recording anything you say before you wake them up. Only after you use the wake word — such as “Alexa” for Amazon Echo, “Hey, Siri” for Apple HomePod or “OK, Google” for Google Home — does the speaker start listening.

How to turn your smart speaker, TV off

If you’re nervous about all this data collection, you can disconnect. But if you enjoy the convenience of using voice, which many find more intuitive compared to typing, and you don’t want to give up your speakers or smart TV, consider some steps for added privacy.

On most smart TVs, you will turn off snooping automatic content recognition (ACR) technology. But how you go about it will vary with your TV’s make and model.

In most cases, you will start with the Settings or Hub option. Check your user guide. Also look for guidance on how to delete information it already has saved.

On your Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speakers, mute the speaker by pressing a button on the top or back of the device. With Apple’s HomePod, you can ask Siri to mute the speaker or use the app to disable it.

To delete information already saved:

Apple HomePod. If you would like to stop your HomePod speaker from listening for your commands, you can simply say “Hey, Siri, stop listening.” Or from the Home app on your iPhone or iPad, go to Rooms | HomePod | Details | Listen for Hey Siri and turn the switch off.

To remove your voice data on your iPhone and iPad, turn off both Ask Siri in Settings | Siri and Dictation in Settings | General | Keyboard. Note that Apple’s privacy policy says that your voice records may be kept for an undisclosed period.

Amazon Echo. In your Alexa app, go to Settings | Alexa Privacy | Review Voice History and delete everything. Alternatively, sign in at amazon.com and click Account & Lists | Content & Devices | Echo Dot (or another device) | Manage voice recordings. A pop-up will give you the chance to clear it out.

These recordings are securely stored in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and tied to your Amazon account to allow the service to be personalized to you, Amazon says. They are stored until customers choose to delete them.

Google Home. Go to myactivity.google.com and tap or click Web & App Activity. Here you can review and delete activity across all Google services you’re signed into.

Google says it does not sell your personal information to anyone, but it has caveats: “There are some circumstances where we share information with third parties, which are listed in Google’s Privacy Policy. And in these cases, we will have previously asked you to give us permission to share that information with that service.”