Summary
Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by smart speaker platforms as well as third party skills supported on them. To bridge this gap, we build a framework to measure data collection, usage, and sharing by the smart speaker platforms. We apply our framework to the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem. Our results show that Amazon and third parties, including advertising and tracking services that are unique to the smart speaker ecosystem, collect smart speaker interaction data. We also find that Amazon processes smart speaker interaction data to infer user interests and uses those inferences to serve targeted ads to users. Smart speaker interaction also leads to ad targeting and as much as 30X higher bids in ad auctions, from third party advertisers. Finally, we find that Amazon’s and third party skills’ data practices are often not clearly disclosed in their policy documents.
Papers and Presentations
- Umar Iqbal, Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, Rahmadi Trimananda, Hao Cui, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Daniel Dubois, David Choffnes, Athina Markopoulou, Franziska Roesner, Zubair Shafiq. “Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem”, Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2023.
- Umar Iqbal, Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, Rahmadi Trimananda, Hao Cui, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Daniel Dubois, David Choffnes, Athina Markopoulou, Franziska Roesner, Zubair Shafiq, “Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.10920, Technical Report (extended paper). April 2022.
[ Github ]
Press
- Amazon keeps growing, and so does its cache of data on you, AP News, August 23, 2022.
- Ad Targeting in Amazon Smart Speakers, Data Skeptic (Podcast), August 22, 2022.
- Privacy Concerns Over Growing Household Footprint, Fox News, August 2022.
- Lawsuit claims Amazon using Alexa to target ads at customers, Axios, June 16, 2022.
- Ad Targeting Segment, Fox 12 KPTV-TV, May 1, 2022.
- Report Reveals How Amazon Uses Alexa Voice Data for Targeted Ads, PC Mag, April 29, 2022.
- Researchers find Amazon uses Alexa voice data to target you with ads, The Verge, April 28, 2022.
- Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads, The Register, April 27, 2022.
Team
- Rahmadi Trimananda (UC Irvine)
- Luca Baldesi (UC Irvine)
- Tu Le (UC Irvine)
- Athina Markopoulou (UC Irvine)
- Umar Iqbal (Washington University)
- Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami (UC Davis)
- Hao Cui (UC Irvine)
- Alexander Gamero-Garrido (Northeastern University)
- Daniel Dubois (Northeastern University)
- David Choffnes (Northeastern University)
- Franziska Roesner (University of Washington)
- Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis)
Contact
If you have any questions about the paper, software, or dataset, please email properdata@uci.edu.