[Cryptography] German govt tells parents to destroy WiFi-connected doll

[Christian Huitema]

On 2/22/2017 2:19 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Henry Baker:
>
>> Perhaps Alexa is (should be) next?
> Alexa isn't the problem, isn't that just some voice processing
> service?  I think the products are called Echo, and they might
> qualify.

There is a marked difference between the Amazon Echo and the Cayla doll.
The Echo device waits for a keyword, "Alexa", and only starts sending
voice commands to Amazon after hearing that. The Cayla doll appears to
listen and send data all the time. In one case, there is clear user
intent to "talk to Alexa". In the other case, it is just an open microphone.

This came to play when the police asked Amazon to provide voice
recordings as part of a murder investigation:
https://cdt.org/blog/alexa-is-law-enforcement-listening/. Amazon
answered that they could not.

But then, pretty much all the "natural voice" services use cloud
processing. Small devices appear to not have enough power and processing
capability to fully understand voice. When working locally, their
vocabulary is very limited, and that doesn't feel "natural". Microsoft,
Google, Amazon, Nuance, Apple, they all send the voice input to their
cloud servers. And they tend to all collect logs of voice samples to
better train their services.

-- Christian Huitema