Mr. Smith, meanwhile, has said that officers had followed the proper procedure in such a case, and had obtained a search warrant from a judge based on probably cause.
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The Bentonville police department presented Amazon with a search warrant for all audio recording, transcript, or data obtained through the Echo device between November 21 and November 22, 2015.
Amazon’s Echo comes with a voice-activated personal assistant, Alexa, and is constantly “listening” for commands, ranging from playing music on Spotify to ordering pizza from Domino’s. Still, if any of this has you feeling uneasy about your Amazon Echo, you can always head to amazon.com/myx, find your Echo, and delete out all of your old voice recordings. While Amazon’s devices dominated that last-minute delivery list, Oreo cookies were also a popular gift.
Amazon hasn’t disclosed the data Bates’ Echo transmitted to its servers, although it did provide police with Bates’ account information and purchase history.
Victor Collins lay there, facing down in James Bates’ hot tub.
Throughout the short years that the Amazon Echo has been on the market, it has become a vital item in all smart homes. “The Echo is not protected from the warrant requirement”. A search warrant states that police believe they could have extracted audio recordings, transcribed records, text records, and “other data”. But police extracted the data from it independently.
We spoke with the executive director of Springdale water utilities which uses meters similar to those in Bentonville. In that case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation eventually had to turn to a third party to access the phone’s contents.
While it’s true that if the evidence proves Bates’ guilt, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the increasing frequency of law enforcement investigations revolving around technology many Americans trust in their most private moments represents a new age in self-incrimination.
“The hours that kids spent interacting with educational content in Amazon FreeTime this holiday season was enough time to sail around the earth more than 6,000 times”. Those snippets of audio could potentially be useful to police investigating a crime, as could the timing information of when they were recorded.
And here’s the thing… We hope you feel better, buddy.
It’s also an interesting case study on how an information-rich environment may change police procedures and trigger new privacy battles among customers, tech companies and authorities.
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The Echo does come with a “mute” button to stop the device from listening in, but otherwise its ear is always open.
