Front Burner - Can you trust your home smart speaker?

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

"I have a love-hate relationship with it." CBC senior technology reporter, Matthew Braga, explains how smart speakers work, why companies like Google and Amazon want you to have one in your home, and what privacy issues you should consider before setting up a Google Home or an Amazon Echo on your kitchen counter.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So, last year I got a smart speaker for Christmas.

Maybe you just got one too. And right away I did all the things that people do when they get themselves a smart speaker. I asked it to play a song, to read a recipe, to put an appointment into my calendar. But now I'm having some second thoughts about my smart speaker. First, I read this article about a family in Portland whose Amazon Echo recorded their conversations and then sent it to someone in their own contact list. The person on the other line said, unplug your Alexa devices right now. Then, there was this really weird story about Alexas that just started laughing randomly. Random chuckles coming out of their Alexa in the dark. There are way bigger questions too.

Like, what's the long game for these big tech companies? And did I just bring a surveillance device into my home? Today on FrontBurner, I'm actually pretty worried about my smart speaker. And I'm talking to Matt Braga about it. He's a senior technology reporter for the CBC. Hi, Matt. Hello, Jamie. How are you?

I'm well. I'm good. I listen to the show sometimes on my smart speaker. Oh, good. I hope that you're listening to it every day on multiple devices. So first to get started, how do these devices work? So first to get started, how do these devices work? So imagine a speaker that has a bunch of microphones in it. And the way these things work is people have this idea about smart speakers that they are always listening to everything that is happening in their houses.

Are they? Are they always listening to me? So the short answer is yes, but with a giant asterisk, like a giant caveat, because the way these devices work is it's really tough to create a device that is always like attentively listening all the time to everything you say. And so the way that smart speakers, the work, the way that if you have an Android phone, Google Assistant, if you have an iPhone, Siri, the way that these things are designed is they're programmed to listen for what's called a wake word. Alexa, what is the weather in Raleigh, North Carolina?

So technically, on a technical level, the devices are always listening. They're always listening for what's happening in the world. But they're not listening to everything you say. They're listening for that wake word. And once they hear that wake word, it's like the device suddenly gets permission to listen to everything that comes after the wake word. So if you have a Google Home, it's like, hey, Google. Okay, Google.

Yeah, if you have a Google Home, it's hey, Google. If you have an Amazon Echo, it's Alexa. Hey, Alexa. Hi, Alexa. That could be hey, Siri. And essentially, these devices are designed in such a way that they are only listening for that wake word, and it's not until they hear that wake word do they actually pay attention to everything that comes afterwards. Do you have one of these devices?

I do. What kind of stuff do you do with it? I have a love-hate relationship with it. It's unplugged right now, but I was using it for a while, mostly to stream music. I have dumb speakers, and they were a really good way to get Spotify and music on my phone onto the speakers, which was kind of neat. That's why I like mine. I listen to way more music now that I have it. Yeah, and that's sort of one of the convenient things about it.

I mean, I also liked, for a little while, we had a light switch, right? It was connected to the internet and would turn on a light at various points of the day. So it was kind of cool to be able to say, hey, Alexa, you know, turn on my living room light. Or if I would be in the kitchen and my hands would be covered in like sauce or, you know, bread dough or meat or something, right? Being able to set timers and ask for conversions. I'm awful at conversions. So being able to ask my phone, you know, hey, Siri, how many tablespoons are in a quarter cup? Because I guess that's something that I have no idea. I couldn't tell you. I have no idea. And so where does the hate part of the relationship come in come with this stuff, right? You do hear those horror stories of people's devices suddenly being activated because of

glitches or because of other reasons. It was just this morning, I think, that I saw a story about how this one owner of one of these devices was somehow able to hear the recordings that another user's device had made, which is kind of weird, right? And so there's always these stories that come up now and then of sort of these glitches and things like that. And also just the way in which these devices work is they collect data and they store data to various degrees, depending on the manufacturer and depending on the device.

And sometimes I think, you know, is this worth it? Is this a worthy trade-off just to have, you know, hands-free ability to turn on a light with your voice or play music with your voice? I want to get to the kind of data that these devices are collecting from us and how it's being used and monetized. But first, I want to get a sense of how these devices are changing the way that we interact with the internet. So you hear a lot about the future of the internet, the internet of things. And how do these smart home devices fit into that? So there is this trend, I think, that is beginning to emerge where algorithms and like speech recognition have gotten very good in the past couple of years. There's been these huge leaps in being able to recognize voices and being able to understand what people are saying, how they're saying it, even the emotion with which people are saying it, which is really interesting.

to look forward and say, well, maybe we're nearing a point in the near to mid future where people aren't just going to be searching for things or asking questions using a keyboard and mouse or using their smartphone screen. We'll actually get to a point where it becomes pretty reasonable to just be able to ask questions, right? Hey, Google, what's on the calendar today? The first event is Space Day at Kevin's school. So maybe you're in your car and you want to know where the nearest gas station is and the technology gets good enough that you can just ask it, right? Or you're in your kitchen and you want to know, hey, I've got all this stuff in my fridge. Like what can I bake with it or what can I cook with it for dinner tonight? And the systems get good enough that you can just ask that. So I think that's kind of where these devices are being positioned right now is sort of the tip of the spear of what certainly these companies and some evangelists are saying is where computing is heading.

But this new sort of form of interaction, which people often call, you know, natural interaction, so to speak, more natural computer interaction is starting to emerge. And this is the beginning of that. Alexa, play rock music. And is this what people are talking about when they talk about the Internet of Things? A little bit. I mean, broadly speaking, right, the Internet of Things is anything that is connected to the Internet. And by anything, it's often things that you would never think would be connected to the Internet. So those smart light switches are a good example of that, right? Who would have thought that your light

switches, that your electrical outlets were suddenly going to have IP addresses and you were going to be able to control them from your office or from the park or from a concert, let's say. So broadly speaking, that's what we mean by Internet of Things. And smart speakers are a subset of that. I want to get a sense of the business strategy for these big tech companies that have released these home smart speakers. So the three big companies that have these speakers are Amazon, Google, and Apple. And I'm going to guess they might have different goals here. So let's go through them one at a time.

Let's start with Amazon. Sure. What does Amazon want out of a home smart speaker? So Amazon is in an interesting spot where Amazon wants to sell you things. Amazon wants to have the most effective and targeted and personalized shopping experience on the internet. And so smart speakers are one way to do that, right? If they kind of look forward and they realize where consumer habits are going, right? They're trying to find new ways to catch consumers in the moment. So I think one going, right? They're trying to find new ways

to catch consumers in the moment. So I think one of the things that Amazon is trying to do with these speakers is really reduce that friction between you and your purchase, right? So if you suddenly realize that you're out of toilet paper, how much easier would it be just to say, hey, Alexa, can you buy me more toilet paper, right? As opposed to having to take out your phone or remember later on to go to the store. It's that sort of contextual, I think, shopping experience that Amazon is trying to build out. And so there's the shopping side of it, which is something that I think is still a small slice of how people are using these devices, but it's growing.

The other side of it is I think Amazon also realizes that, look, even if people are buying these devices and they're using them to just ask questions or set timers or control other devices or play music, you're still getting a lot of sense of trends, of when people do certain types of activities, of the type of consumers that people are. And so maybe that doesn't necessarily directly relate to driving more sales on Amazon, but it's data and it's insights that can be used to make that shopping experience more tailored. So an example I was thinking of just earlier, right, is, and I have no idea if they're doing this, but I imagine that timers, for example, everyone loves to set timers on these things. I love to set timers. I can only imagine they would have the ability to see exactly when people set timers and they'd probably be able to get a pretty good sense of like all the people who were

setting timers between the hours of, you know, 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. in an evening are probably cooking. And then you can kind of get a sense of, OK, well, who's doing that regularly? What sort of timers they're setting? What are the length of timers they're setting? I don't know. It's just the sort of thing where I imagine if you were a very smart data scientist, you could probably infer a lot more about people

than they realize just off of something like timers. One concern I've heard about the Amazon Echo and how it fits into their business model is the idea that what you were talking about, this idea that you're going to make this seamless shopping experience for people, but that what could result from that is a scenario in which I'm like, hey, Alexa, I'd like paper towel. I'd like bounty paper towels. And it's like, I don't understand you. I only have Amazon brand paper towels. And I'm going to send you and you're like, no, I'd like bounty paper towel. And they're like, again, don't understand you. Amazon paper towel coming to your door tomorrow. And, you know, there are real concerns around this that it will sort of cement

or increase the monopoly power of this company and put other companies even out of business. And I think that taps into sort of a larger concern about Amazon is how is Amazon leveraging its position to elevate its brand and favorite partners over others? So if you're searching for paper towels on the Amazon website or the Amazon app, it's pretty easy to just keep scrolling down or refine your search or use your filters. And that, I think, is kind of one of the tradeoffs. And the flip sides of using voice interaction is it's much more cumbersome to, and I don't know whether people would even want to do this,

to go through options of all the different types of paper towels. And so it's just that idea of, you know what, it's saving you time. It's more convenient than you having to kind of sift through things. It's sort of like the old days, and I say the old days in sort of a loose way, but the way that we always used to trust the Google algorithm to really kind of bring the most relevant search results at the very top of the list. And now it's like you search for things on Google and you're getting these, you know, you get the ads on the top, you get sort of these weird info boxes that get popped in,

you get Google News results that are, you know, I think increasingly people are kind of wondering, you know, are we getting the most authoritative or correct search results in a lot of cases? And so, yeah, I think this applies to Amazon as well. Those old days of the Google search. Let's move to Google then. Why does Google want a smart speaker? So similar to Amazon, but a little bit different, right? I mean, and Google for a long time has been able to monetize what people search for, how they use their email, how they use their phones, other kind of Google products and services. And I think what Google is looking towards is a future in which consumer habits shift,

right? So if smart speakers catch on and more people are using things like Amazon Echo or Apple Siri to ask questions, to perform searches, to play music, to do all this sort of stuff, that takes market share away from Google. That takes what is really kind of Google's lifeblood, right? All of these questions and queries that people are making, that diverts it away from Google. That takes what is really kind of Google's lifeblood, right? All of these questions and queries that people are making, that diverts it away from Google. And so I think Google is realizing that it also needs to make a beachhead here as well, because Google requires a constant stream of this information for different reasons than Amazon,

right? Amazon essentially is using it to sell you more stuff. Google is using it to make more money. This is all information that could theoretically be used for ad targeting purposes, which is really where Google's main source of revenue comes from. And what about Apple? Why does Apple want one of these? Apple is an interesting case, right? Because Apple's approach to data collection on these things is a little bit different, right? They like to make a big show out of the fact that they're not storing everything that you ask Siri, right?

They're not tying it to your account. They're kind of anonymizing everything. And that's in large part because really what Apple is in the business of is they are selling hardware, right? They are trying to sell hardware for which they get high margins from. And this is another sort of selling point that makes Apple's phones more and more valuable, which is why they can take a little bit of a different approach. And arguably, some critics sort of of Siri will say why Siri sometimes isn't as good as some of the other competitors because they're not leveraging data perhaps in the same way. Another thing to keep in mind is that Siri for a long time has been available on the phones.

Siri, do you want a banana? The first smart speaker that Apple launched is actually pretty different from the way that Google Home and Amazon Echo works. It's really a device that's focused around music. Most of the questions, most of the functionality is about playing music and asking questions about music and putting up playlists and interacting with Apple's Apple Music service. So, again, it's driving people towards Apple Music rather than trying to sort of do some larger kind of monetization play the way that I think Amazon and Google are after. You've been talking quite a bit about the kind of data that these devices could be gathering. You know, is the data that's being collected through these devices, is it any different than the data that's being collected through our phones, for example? Yeah, so it depends on who we're talking about.

So with both Amazon and Google, anything that you ask these devices, you can actually go on their websites or go into their apps. And you can listen to every query that you have asked these devices. These companies store that information in part because they say transparency, but also because it allows them to train its systems to be better, to recognize you better, and also to learn from you and from what you're asking. We've invested an enormous amount of work over the years to bring choice, transparency, and control to our users. These values are built into every product we make. And so there's that voice data that gets retained by Amazon and Google, but there's also all that other contextual metadata, right? The question I think becomes is, well, what kind of comes next from that, right? It might be the case that in the future where your smart home device

doesn't just know what you're asking, it knows your emotional state when you're asking it as well. That's something that I think has been raised a lot as sort of a concern that people might have as well. Oh my gosh, like what if my smart speaker knows that I'm sad or knows that I'm angry or knows that I'm frustrated or is able to infer that? I mean, how could that further factor into some of the monetization strategies of these companies? We don't really know at this point, but that's something that people have raised. And maybe if I was angry, they might try to sell me something so I would feel better. Yeah.

I always feel better when I go shopping. So I think that's where I was going with that. No, absolutely. And so that's kind of interesting. I mean, Apple's a little bit of a different case where Apple, again, says that anything that you ask Siri, we don't tie it to your account. So you can't go to some portal on Apple's website and say, give me everything I've ever asked Siri, because Apple says, well, we don't store it that way.

We don't tie it to your account. Anytime you ask Siri a question, they basically assign it this new, essentially random identifier, right? And so it means that Apple is able to still learn from what people are saying, but they're not able to tie it back to you and they're not monetizing it in sort of the way that Amazon and Google certainly are. I also want to talk about potential security concerns or glitches, because as we've just talked about, there are concerns about how the companies are using this data and how they're sharing this data and whether or not we feel like that's a privacy breach or not.

And then there's this other concern that the information could be hacked. Are there actual hacking and data breach concerns? The silver lining, I guess, is that everyone who has tried to attack one of these devices, to hack into one of these devices, hasn't been able to do it remotely. It's the sort of thing that, you know, really requires you to have someone to have physical access to the device, right, to take it apart or to plug it into something or to really kind of do something that frankly is quite targeted and probably isn't going to be what we call a threat model for most people, right? I guess the other concern, certainly if you are a Google customer or an Amazon customer,

is, well, what happens if someone is able to get access to that dashboard of all of the things you've ever asked? So certainly that is kind of one concern. And then what about these glitches, right? Like this family in Portland who had their private conversations in their living room recorded and then sent to someone in their contact list. Like just imagine that I have all these conversations in my living room and then they accidentally get sent to you, Matt Braga. They'll just be very embarrassing for me probably. I think that's probably one of the more realistic concerns for people, right? As we've heard these devices being triggered, believing that they've heard their wake word when they haven't. But it's interesting how the mechanisms that these companies have built into these devices to secure them, right? The

fact that they're only supposed to respond to their wake words. People are trying to figure out ways to overcome that and to get around that, which I think is interesting. And there's also this real worry that this information can be used against you in court, too. What happens if people within sort of the court system can compel Amazon or Google to give access to those stored recordings? But again, in that case, right, that's a higher bar. That's a lot harder than just being able to sort of take the device from someone's home and bring it down to the police station and have the forensic engineers kind of go at it, right? That's not really how it works. And so as a result, you know, they recognize, right, if they make it easy for lawyers to

just walk up and say, hey, give us all the recordings, people aren't going to want to buy these things. And so they've tried to be pretty staunch about not giving up access to those recordings when they can. giving up access to those recordings when they can. So we're seeing this real proliferation of these devices. Last year, it was estimated that nearly 2 million smart speakers were sold in Canada. And this is a very popular item for the holidays this year as well. Do you think the consumers are fully aware of all of these concerns

when they install smart speakers in their home? I think some people are fully aware of all of these concerns when they install smart speakers in their home? I think some people are aware. It's hard to say how much people really realize what's going on here, right? Especially when these devices are so cheap. They're really inexpensive. They always go on sale around the holidays. You can get these things for like 30, 40 bucks. And so people are buying these. And I don't know if everyone fully realizes just sort of what could be possible down the road. And I think that that I think more than anything is the is the big takeaway. And always the hard conversation to have with these things is that no one ever realizes how data that is collected could be used down the road, right? Right now, I think a lot of people realize that, okay, well,

and you can even see it in these apps. You can go back and you can see all the queries that you've been asked and you kind of think, okay, well, I can go in and delete this at any time. I can go in and manage this in a way that makes me feel good. But I often wonder whether five years down the road, 10 years down the road, it suddenly emerges that, like, holy crap, like

these companies were able to infer way more about us and our habits. And we're sharing it in a way that we just couldn't have conceived of at the time because these devices were so new. And, you know, they're always presented as very kind of helpful and very altruistic and kind of fun. And, you know, you give them those gifts. Right, right, right. I mean, even just the fact that they're so often given as gifts, right, I think really

kind of creates this notion of them being almost toy like we're at a point where we almost need to have a conversation as a society as to whether we're fine with the direction that we're going in. Right. around personal choices where these devices exist, people buy them, and you kind of have to decide whether you as an individual or you as your family are comfortable with having these devices in your home. But I think as they increasingly proliferate, we just really need to be thinking critically, I think, about whether we're fine with the direction that we're heading and whether there's a way for people to opt out. Matt, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Jamie. Happy New Year. You too.

That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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