Privacy Concerns Over Amazon Echo; WCNC, June 8, 2017

Savannah Levins, WCNC; Privacy Concerns Over Amazon Echo

"A new feature on the popular Amazon Echo is causing some major privacy concerns.

The new feature unveiled last month allows your Amazon Alexa to make calls and send voice messages. But that also means a simple slip could send your conversations out for anyone to hear.

A Cary, N.C. man says the update caused his device to record and send out a private conversation."

Olivia Solon, Guardian; 

With the latest WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA – is privacy really dead?

"In the week that WikiLeaks revealed the CIA and MI5 have an armoury of surveillance tools that can spy on people through their smart TVs, cars and cellphones, the FBI director, James Comey, has said that Americans should not have expectations of “absolute privacy”.

“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America: there is no place outside of judicial reach,” Comey said at a Boston College conference on cybersecurity. The remark came as he was discussing the rise of encryption since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools, used on citizens around the world...

So, where does this leave us? Is privacy really dead, as Silicon Valley luminaries such as Mark Zuckerberg have previously declared?

Not according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director, Cindy Cohn.

“The freedom to have a private conversation – free from the worry that a hostile government, a rogue government agent or a competitor or a criminal are listening – is central to a free society,” she said."