Amazon Echo Devices Collect Voice Data To Push Targeted Ads, Say Researchers

According to security researchers from the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine and Northeastern University, data collected while chatting with a customer by Amazon may be shared with more than 40 advertising partners.

Smart speakers collect voice input that can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Image: Getty

New Delhi: As useful as the Amazon Echo lineup of smart speakers is, it has now got researchers worried as a new report says that Amazon has been using Echo devices to push targeted advertisements to users on not only its platform but also the wider web. According to security researchers from the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine and Northeastern University, data collected while chatting with a customer by Amazon may be shared with more than 40 advertising partners, in a paper titled Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem.

Smart speakers collect voice input that can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given a number of egregious privacy breaches, there is a clear unmet need for greater transparency and control over data collection, sharing, and use by smart speaker platforms as well as third-party skills supported on them, the researcher wrote in the paper.

"To bridge the gap, we build an auditing framework that leverages online advertising to measure data collection, its usage, and its sharing by the smart speaker platforms. We evaluate our framework on the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem. Our results show that Amazon and third parties (including advertising and tracking services) collect smart speaker interaction data. We find that Amazon processes voice data to infer user interests and uses it to serve targeted ads on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web)," the security researchers added.

According to a report published in The Verge, Amazon has acknowledged that it uses voice inputs from Alexa chats and shows "relevant ads" on Amazon or other sites where it places ads. However, the tech giant objected to the research paper’s conclusion on the main point about wider web advertising.