Your smart speaker is listening to you, and it’s not just the manufacturer – find out about the other risks you face.
Smart speakers are a must for anyone wanting to create a voice-activated home – from listening to music and podcasts to controlling your latest connected gadgets, the devices have become a household staple.
So much so that, in the first three months of 2022, more than 30 million were shipped globally, with Amazon at the forefront of the race accounting for around one-third of them with its Alexa-enabled devices.
However VPNOverview (opens in new tab) has uncovered some troubling research indicating that your smart speaker is collecting more data about you than you may have initially realized.
Smart speakers are always listening to you (unless you turn off that functionality, which kind of defeats the point), and they’re widely able to keep recordings or transcriptions of what you said to help developers make them even more intuitive, but at what cost?
While Amazon, Google, and Apple all make promises of minimal data collection and high levels of security, many users will have enabled third-party integrations that allow them to interact with a number of services, from connected cars to food ordering apps and just about everything in between.
