Too clever: "Smart" speaker from Amazon spies on users

The fact that our gadgets are spying on us, sharing our secrets with advertisers, and, for sure, with the special services, has long been known. Another example found was researched from the University of California. It turned out that the Echo smart speaker is spying on its owners and sharing the received recordings with 41 companies in order to better target ads, the Exploit channel reports.

For the study, a whole audit system was developed: they created a dozen fake profiles, under which they spent hours talking to the smart speaker about various queries with keywords. Then, the results of search queries and the frequency of displaying different ads were compared with accounts that did not participate in the experiment.

In their document, the researchers recalled that in 2018, Amazon received a patent that described the possibility of using the emotions and mood of the user to provide him with targeted advertising. So this is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.