Alexa, Whodunit?
There is a body lying on the ground, if only it could talk. Was it the husband? His mistress? Or the angry neighbor? Fingerprints do not lie, even evidence such as hair, shoe prints, they all tell a story and guess who is helping corroborate nowadays; Alexa.
In 2017 in Massachusetts, the police responded to a breaking and entering call from a woman who have reported that there were items missing from her home (among the items was her Alexa), she told the police that an audio recording found on the Alexa app on her phone proves that someone had been in her apartment (Press Herald, 2017). The women could also recognize the voice of the burglar; it was no other but her 9 year old neighbor, Since then there have been several incidents in which the police have utilized Alexa and so did some U.S. courts for alibis; prosecutors have even dismissed charges against a man from Arkansan who was accused of strangling and drowning his friend to death in a hot tub at his home (Burke, 2019).
So how does it work and is this considered an evasion of privacy? Any content on any Alexa-enabled device would appear in your Alexa app, information on the card may include weather forecast, search histories and most importantly the Voice Feedback that tells you what Alexa heard in which it would ask you if it did what you wanted or not to provide feedback for further commands. Of course you have the option of deleting all the content on the card at any given point, you can also be selective about the data you want to delete or delete all if you would like. As for privacy concerns, no, Amazon has no interest in eavesdropping on your conversations and the terms for using Alexa are clear, it has to record your voice to improve the system for you and match it to your way of speech to increase its effectiveness. In extreme cases and especially when it comes to murder crimes Amazon would turn over the recordings, according to an Amazon spokesperson the company “does not disclose customer information in response to government demands unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order”.
If anything, Alexa proved to come in handy solving minor and major crime therefore reshaping the future of crime investigation.
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