Voice assistants are growing rapidly in popularity -- but at the same time, the privacy concerns and security issues with popular home assistant devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home are also peaking.
Earlier in July, Amazon came under fireafter acknowledging that it retains the voice recordings and transcripts of customers' interactions with its Alexa voice assistant indefinitely - raising questions about how long companies should be able to save highly-personal data collected from voice assistant devices.
Amazon continues to find itself in hot water regarding privacy policies around its Echo devices. In April, Amazon came under fire after a report revealedthe company employs thousands of auditors to listen to Echo users' voice recordings. And last year, Amazon inadvertentlysent 1,700 audio files containing recordings of Alexa interactions by a customer to a random person –and later characterized it as a "mishap" that came down to one employee's mistake.
Against this backdrop, Threatpost talks about the top privacy concerns regarding voice assistants with Tim Mackey, principal security strategist at the cybersecurity research center at Synopsys - and what types of regulation aim to curb these concerns.