In today’s world, we are introduced with so many technological advances. Some of the advances offered are voice assistant devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby. It cannot be denied that these devices do help in the everyday life because it gives people with physical abilities easy access, eliminate spelling problems, saves time, and even increases productivity. Although they have their advantages, these devices seem to have many disadvantages too. It requires large amount of memory to store voice files, less accurate when there is background noise, can be distracting if used in a classroom setting, and the most important thing to know is that it can be hacked too. These devices have many advantages but when talking about technology one has to consider it’s privacy and security measures.
In 2017, a former Amazon employee named Martin Josephson went home from work and found his Alexa talking and requesting to book for train tickets that he had already taken although no one said the wake word “Alexa” to activate it. He felt foolish to use the device as he knew how Amazon uses other people’s data. Another case is from a guy named Shawn Kinnear, he said that his device activated by itself and said “Everytime I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” A more terrifying experience is from a woman who also found out that her voice assistant device sent a recording of a private conversation between her and her husband to one of her husband’s employee. These cases raise me a question about how serious they care about the people’s privacy and their security measures.
Until this day, there has not been any regulations/official law about data privacy and we should always be careful since there are no laws protecting us. It is important to be aware of these kinds of things as privacy matters and that information always has value for somebody. Anybody can take advantage of any information of a person and it could be a boomerang for us. Correspondingly, a country should be able to develop their law to keep pace with technology and it is necessary to immediately make privacy law present so that the people can get clear protection and that they feel safe because to give protection is one of the role of governments that should be fulfilled. Lastly, I believe that the company should make the devices into offline devices so that it doesn’t require Internet to work to cut the access to the cloud, with that, our privacy concern will decrease.
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