A patent granted to Amazon in October describes technology that could let its AI assistant analyze a user's voice and infer characteristics including health status and likely nation of origin. Privacy experts warn that governments could use such capabilities against people, according to a newly published story by The Intercept.
The patent outlines consumer-facing uses. Alexa could detect a cough between words and offer to order flu medicine, or infer that a user is speaking Chinese-accented English and suggest a device that streams Chinese-language television in real time. Those functions resemble what Amazon and other technology companies already do with user data, the report notes.
How Government Access Could Work
The greater risk, surveillance and cybersecurity lawyer Jennifer Granick told The Intercept, is what happens if a government seeks access to the information Amazon would collect. She described a scenario in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks a provider for subscription information on users with Spanish accents, in order to identify people of a particular race or who theoretically might have relatives who are undocumented. "So you can see that this type information can definitely be abused," Granick said.
Two limits on the concern are worth noting. A patent approval does not guarantee that Amazon or any other company will build the accent-detecting technology. And there is no evidence that a government has expressed interest in it.
Even so, the report argues, the potential unintended consequences of a new technology merit scrutiny, particularly when the company developing it reaches as many users as Amazon does.
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Editorial Notes