According to a survey, 90 million adults of the United States use the smart speaker for day to day assistance. Assistance such as creating shopping lists set timers, and reminders, check whether YouTube videos assistance and even chat with family and friends. The smart speakers listen to you patiently whenever you call it. But most of you don’t know that the same smart speakers listen to your private conversations.

A team of researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College London took the initiative to determine whether the smart speakers of different companies record private conversations from the surroundings. The companies included Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google. For their study, the researchers used Netflix by playing different shows in different accents and voices for 134 hours. The team also recorded the whole thing by setting up cameras. The cameras were able to capture the speakers lighting up which depicts the listening mode.

The study was shocking and according to the study, all the shows woke up the smart speakers at least once. The shows triggered multiple devices to wake up at different times. And on average the speaker remained activated for five hours listening to the audios in the environment. But to sum it up the experiment conducted resulted in one mis-activation per hour.

The smart speakers were mis-activated more when the accent of the shows was not English. This determines that households using smart speakers where English is the second language experience more ears dropping by the speakers. There is a higher breach of privacy in such households. People speaking at distance also triggers the smart speakers to get activated. There are cases when the smart speakers are mistaken with the words. They interpret them as their wake words and get triggered. But there were instances as well from which the smart speakers didn’t make the same mistake twice.

David Choffnes, Ph.D., study co-author and an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University shared that “People are always asking ‘Are the devices constantly recording?’ And we have no evidence to support that. When the devices do wake up, they don’t record for minutes or hours. It tends to be on the order of single-digit or tens of seconds.”

But now the main question is what should be done? A former manager at Amazon Web Services, Robert Fredrick shared that one can change the settings of the smart speakers. Robert shared that while having a private conversation he usually turns of the smart speaker. One can even monitor the recording. In Apple devices, one can go to the recordings and delete whatever they want to. Recordings are recorded to make improvements in the product but privacy is also important. The final way of using the product depends upon the consumer.

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