quote:The Scientific Services of the German Bundestag was asked to take a look at how Alexa works and how the device fits within the country's current privacy laws. It concluded, in a report made public this week, that there is ample evidence that the Amazon device routinely records things it is not supposed to and that the internet giant stores those recordings far longer than it needs to. That raises some serious legal questions, the dossier notes. The report [PDF] references several cases where people have been wrongly recorded – including a case where a man received a recording of a totally different couple, recordings being cited in a murder trial, and several lawsuits against Amazon for recording kids. It also notes that Amazon acknowledges that its system sometimes mishears the "wake word" and starts recording when people don't expect it to. But, the report notes, Amazon makes no distinction between intended and accidental recordings, treating them both the same by storing the recording and creating a transcript from the data. Germany, particularly the former East Germany, has a long and uncomfortable history of bugging civilians and misusing the results. As a result the country takes the issue very seriously.
