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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2204.10920 (cs)
[Submitted on 22 Apr 2022]

Title:Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in
the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem

Authors:Umar Iqbal, Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami, Rahmadi Trimananda, Hao
Cui, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Daniel Dubois, David Choffnes, Athina
Markopoulou, Franziska Roesner, Zubair Shafiq
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    Abstract: Smart speakers collect voice input that can be used to
    infer sensitive information about users. Given a number of
    egregious privacy breaches, there is a clear unmet need for
    greater transparency and control over data collection, sharing,
    and use by smart speaker platforms as well as third party skills
    supported on them. To bridge the gap, we build an auditing
    framework that leverages online advertising to measure data
    collection, its usage, and its sharing by the smart speaker
    platforms. We evaluate our framework on the Amazon smart speaker
    ecosystem. Our results show that Amazon and third parties
    (including advertising and tracking services) collect smart
    speaker interaction data; where Amazon shares it with as many as
    41 advertising partners. We find that Amazon processes voice data
    to infer user interests and uses it to serve targeted ads
    on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web). Smart
    speaker interaction leads to as much as 30X higher ad bids from
    advertisers. Finally, we find that Amazon's and skills'
    operational practices are often inconsistent with their privacy
    policies

Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as:  arXiv:2204.10920 [cs.CR]
          (or arXiv:2204.10920v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.10920
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Umar Iqbal [view email]
[v1] Fri, 22 Apr 2022 20:21:21 UTC (2,631 KB)
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