Carding 4 Carders
Professional
Your home assistant may know a lot more than you think.
Smart speakers provide amazing convenience, allowing you to play your favorite music or order toilet paper with a simple voice command. However, for such convenience, the user can pay dearly in the form of privacy damage, which many consumers do not even know about.
Umar Iqbal, associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Mcelvie School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, said: "We found that Amazon uses smart speaker interaction data to determine user interests and then uses those interests to target personalized ads." This information was not previously explicitly disclosed to Amazon.
The research team presented their work on October 26 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal. The purpose of the study is to provide information about what information is captured by smart speakers, how it is transmitted to third parties, and how these parties use it.
To analyze the data collected by smart devices, the team created several "characters" with interests in certain categories. The researchers then measured data collection by intercepting network traffic, and determined data usage by observing ads targeting each "character."
The team found that up to 41 advertisers sync or share their cookies with Amazon, which are then synced with 247 other third parties. They also found that Amazon does not disclose that smart speaker interactions are used to profile users in order to target ads.
"Unfortunately, surveillance is the business model of the Internet," Iqbal said. He also added that consumer protection agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US and the European Consumer Organization in the EU, have shown considerable interest in the results of the study.
Iqbal stressed that it is important for consumers to be aware of how much data they are transmitting when inviting smart devices into their homes, and how this information can be used.
Smart speakers provide amazing convenience, allowing you to play your favorite music or order toilet paper with a simple voice command. However, for such convenience, the user can pay dearly in the form of privacy damage, which many consumers do not even know about.
Umar Iqbal, associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Mcelvie School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, said: "We found that Amazon uses smart speaker interaction data to determine user interests and then uses those interests to target personalized ads." This information was not previously explicitly disclosed to Amazon.
The research team presented their work on October 26 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal. The purpose of the study is to provide information about what information is captured by smart speakers, how it is transmitted to third parties, and how these parties use it.
To analyze the data collected by smart devices, the team created several "characters" with interests in certain categories. The researchers then measured data collection by intercepting network traffic, and determined data usage by observing ads targeting each "character."
The team found that up to 41 advertisers sync or share their cookies with Amazon, which are then synced with 247 other third parties. They also found that Amazon does not disclose that smart speaker interactions are used to profile users in order to target ads.
"Unfortunately, surveillance is the business model of the Internet," Iqbal said. He also added that consumer protection agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US and the European Consumer Organization in the EU, have shown considerable interest in the results of the study.
Iqbal stressed that it is important for consumers to be aware of how much data they are transmitting when inviting smart devices into their homes, and how this information can be used.
