With their intelligent personal assistants Alexa, Home Pod and Echo, Amazon, Apple and Google are getting a foothold in the living room. Over 15% of Americans have an Amazon Echo in their homes, and over 7% have a Google Home. Meanwhile, 100 million such smart speakers are now in living rooms worldwide. A device that listens to you is convenient, but at the same time smart speakers sometimes make you feel uncomfortable. Anouk Mols of Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication investigates the relationship between humans and digital assistants.
author: Anouk Mols
If you Google "weekend getaway" through your keyboard, you can expect to get ads for hotel packages. Now that the tech giants are also addressable via intelligent personal assistants in cell phones and smart speakers, many people get the feeling that they are being tapped. Partly rightly so, `because to respond to our questions and commands, Siri and Google Assistant must be listening. Still, this is no reason to become afraid, PhD student Anouk Mols believes. ``But we do need to investigate how these types of devices influence our decisions about privacy.''
Some 19.7 million smart speakers sold worldwide in the third quarter of 2018, a 137% growth over 2017. This makes smart speakers among the fastest growing consumer technology, with America leading the way.
US vs. NL
Mols' doctoral research is part of the project 'Mapping Privacy and Surveillance Dynamics' in which she is collaborating from Erasmus University with Jason Pridmore and Daniel Trottier with researchers at the Universities of Maryland and Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Within this project, by means of surveys and (group) interviews, it is investigated how the Dutch and Americans make daily use of various technologies, including digital assistants.
325 employees at Erasmus University and 1160 employees at U.S. universities were surveyed last spring about their use of digital assistants on their phones (such as Siri and Google Assistant) and smart speakers. If you ask at American universities if people are familiar with the Amazon Echo, over 95% confirm.
In the Netherlands, only 54% know the device. Logical, since the device has only been available in the Netherlands since Oct. 24. Privacy concerns exist in both countries, but Dutch respondents, compared with Americans, are more concerned about the processing and possible sale of personal data to third parties, and the use of data to predict behavior and interests. University employees in both the U.S. and the Netherlands have little confidence in smart speaker privacy agreements and security against hackers.
'Google, turn on the lights'
"Among Americans, smart devices are already much more integrated into everyday life," Mols says. The question is how soon this will be the case among Erasmus University employees, as many respondents count themselves among the "late adopters." If you don't experience what such a thing can do, you keep talking a bit in the air. Therefore, we did a group interview with 36 people from the survey, who were allowed to use a Google Home linked to Netflix, Spotify and lighting. So subjects could say, "Ok Google, turn on the lights and play Bruno Mars. As you become more familiar with the technology, you can make better judgments about the pros and cons.'During the interviews, many participants said they don't see themselves using smart speakers, while at the same time they do think it will be a success.'
Fear of eavesdropping
Besides the practical objection ('Soon I'll have to buy new stuff'), there was also fear of being eavesdropped on. Mols: "That fear exists among everyone who participated in the study. People are not so much afraid that their data will be shared with their own government, but rather with commercial companies.' The fear of being bugged is not surprising, since the devices actually "listen" to their trigger word ("Ok Google") all day long. According to Google, the smart assistants do not send information before they hear the trigger word. That a device like Google Home also transmits information to headquarters without a trigger word, Mols does not believe. 'Storing and processing all that data is too much work even for Google. But you have to realize that all your search queries, whether you type them in or dictate them, are stored in a data profile. And that data profile is also augmented with meta-information, such as our location history, what apps we use daily and who we interact with.'
Buy on command
In the Netherlands, you can use your Google Home to add to your Appie shopping list, talk to Buienrader and get the location of a package from PostNL. More companies currently have or are developing a link with your smart speaker. Mols: 'In the Netherlands, too, there will be more and more opportunities to link bank and credit card data to such a service to pay via your smart speaker. The threshold for buying stuff will thus become lower and lower.' Like in America, for example, where a child ordered a dollhouse through Amazon's Alexa assistant. When a TV show covered the incident, viewers' Alexas placed orders again, and so the dolls were dancing.
Permission
'It's good to look critically at the permissions you give such a device,' says Mols. 'The platform economy is dominated by big companies like Google, and it's floating on user data. You see companies wanting to capitalize on that, because they can not only engage customers through those smart speakers, but also build data profiles of those customers. And you can wonder if there will soon be links with your insurance or with your municipality, for example. It is important that we remain in control of the capabilities of your smart speaker and that we have control over financial links and the metadata that is collected. We have to make sure we stay smarter than our smart speakers.'
Source: Erasmus University Rotterdam
This article can also be found in the Internet of Things dossier
