Eventually, the robots will turn against us. The movies are not wrong. Eventually, Echo will determine you can’t be trusted to protect yourself and turn your house into a prison.
But before Amazon Skynet becomes self-aware, other humans will turn the Internet of Things against us. Hackers have already started to make that happen. But now we have a first-of-its-kind case of Echo Evidence. From Business Insider:
According to The Information’s Tom Dotan and Reed Albergotti, the Echo device in question was owned by James Andrew Bates, a Bentonville, Arkansas, resident charged with first-degree murder earlier this year.
A man was found dead in a hot tub at Bates’ home last year, and the police believe additional evidence for the case could be found in the Echo device.
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I struggle to see how the Echo evidence is not discoverable. If they have a warrant, they can toss your house. The Echo is part of the house. It’s a thing where information is stored. “Alexa, turn on the hot tub so I can drown this motherf**ker” seems like something that should be used as evidence against you.
You know what the Echo is not? Your wife. I don’t care how sexy the Echo voice is, you have no marital privilege with it. Your expectation of privacy when telling Echo to unlock the murder room should be no more than your expectation of privacy when writing down “I’ma kill that fool” in your diary.
As we should have learned from Richard Nixon, don’t put recording devices in your business unless you want to be recorded. And since I have nothing else to add:
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Amazon refuses to give police the voice data from an Echo owned by a man charged with murder [Business Insider]
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.