Could Your Smart Speaker Be Spying on You?

You're not being paranoid if everyone is out to get you or if someone is eavesdropping on all your private conversations.

In fact, during the past year it has come to light that those smart voice assistants with friendly names like Alexa and Siri have been spying on their human owners.

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So do you have something to worry about? More important, what can you do to protect yourself?

If you're using Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant, the services are always listening to you and your family. The voice assistants have to in order to respond to a trigger word — “Alexa!” — when you're looking for answers or want something done.

And, yes, they do record what you say and usually keep those recordings.

Ostensibly, these smart speakers with built-in smart microphones do not have nefarious intentions.

They are listening only so they can get better at doing your bidding, and the past recordings of your dulcet tones help improve their accuracy in understanding what you're saying. The recordings can be used to train the systems’ voice recognition to better anticipate context, even tell the difference between your questions and your partner's commands.

At least that's what the companies claim.

Your information, stored in the cloud

The problem is those recordings are stored in the cloud, with information — what you listen to, where you go, what news you tune in — that might be shared with other companies. Furthermore, personal, very personal, audio recordings of people's very private habits have been shared not with impersonal computer algorithms but with live human operators.

The human listeners were hired to make transcripts of the recordings to assess and help improve the programs’ accuracy. Some of those human listeners are the ones who spilled the beans on Alexa and Google Assistant.

Once the revelation became public, Apple and Google said they would temporarily suspend their human listening programs. Amazon decided to let users opt out of the human reviews.

The issue is definitely serious. It's not just about targeted advertising.

Companies use such information, accurate or not, to determine how much you pay for insurance, what rate you'll get on a home mortgage or whether you'll get a job. So protecting your digital privacy is reasonable.

Here's how to do it without giving up the convenience of a smart speaker.

Warning: Some of the steps take patience.