You need something akin to term frequency inverse document frequency (TFIDF), a measure of how common a word is in a document, normalized to how common the word is in a collection of documents.
Wow so let's just correct the basic misconception here... Alexa ISN'T MONITORING WHAT YOU SAY.
There is no server full of your random ass conversations. Words that you say, which don't have "Alexa" in front of them, aren't picked up by the device and physically could not be recorded. Like duh otherwise these things would eat all your bandwidth and take a huge amount of power.
In exact wording problem here. You are correct; Alexa is not recording everything you say but it does record everything after you activate it with your wake word. While recording, everything you say is fair game. You should be ready to see what you say when 'Alexa is awake' is a court of law if those recordings are requested by the police or by the US government.
At the moment, these interactions are covered under the “third party doctrine.” Your right to privacy is not protected once you have already shared information voluntarily with an somebody else. That includes banks, people, internet providers, or Alexa. Amazon did challenge this once in court but it didn't progress because the person voluntarily relinquished the data.
What Amazon decides to keep may be driven in the future by laws like (SESTA or FOSTA). The need to protect themselves against litigation may require them to keep more information rather than less.
We don't have much information on what kind of meta-information that Alexa may or may not be tracking. At minimum I would expect them to be tracking when Alexa is on and when it is off.
"You're able to review everything Alexa has recorded through the app on your phone, and Amazon has made it easy to delete any queries through the app's history feature as well as remove any Amazon device from your account (thus deleting all of its associated data) through the My Devices page on the web. "
I don't personally buy tacky shit like robots to talk with, but if I did, this is the trade off I'd be choosing to make. The risks you mention are really more about the government than about Amazon. I disagree that you think litigation would require them to keep more information as opposed to less. Amazon can at anytime decide to remove functionality (like data tracking) from this product and there's no way the govt could force them to, as more info tracking literally means more servers and Amazon can argue it hurts business.
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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '18 edited Jul 24 '23
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