Security News
Web souk says Echo hardware doesn't have the oomph for next-gen AI anyway Come March 28, those who opted to have their voice commands for Amazon's AI assistant Alexa processed locally on their...
The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission announced that Amazon has agreed to pay a $25 million fine to settle alleged children's privacy laws violations related to the company's Alexa voice assistant service. Amazon also faces a $5 million fine for privacy violations associated with its Ring video doorbell service.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined Amazon a cumulative $30.8 million over a series of privacy lapses regarding its Alexa assistant and Ring security cameras. Amazon has also agreed to fork out an additional $5.8 million in consumer refunds for breaching users' privacy by permitting any employee or contractor to gain broad and unfettered access to private videos recorded using Ring cameras.
The e-tail giant's Ring home security cam subsidiary was accused of "Compromising its customers' privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers' private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers' accounts, cameras, and videos." The FTC complaint also alleges Ring knew its cloud services were susceptible to credential stuffing and brute-force attacks but did little to stymie such efforts.
Amazon will pay $30 million in fines to settle allegations of privacy violations related to the operation of its Ring video doorbell and Alexa virtual assistant services. According to a proposed order, Ring will have to pay $5.8 million in refunds to consumers and will be barred from profiting from unlawfully obtained consumer videos.
How to manage your Alexa voice recordings and privacy. Perhaps you'd like to review those conversations to find mistakes that Alexa has made, rate the accuracy of Alexa's responses or remove any recordings that may be sensitive.
The attack works by using the device's speaker to issue voice commands. As long as the speech contains the device wake word followed by a permissible command, the Echo will carry it out, researchers from Royal Holloway University in London and Italy's University of Catania found.
Without a critical update, Amazon Alexa devices could wake themselves up and start executing audio commands issued by a remote attacker, according to infosec researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London. Executing the attack requires exploitation of Amazon Alexa Skills.
An Amazon Echo owner was left shocked after Alexa proposed a dangerous challenge to her ten-year-old daughter. AI-powered virtual assistants like Alexa that power smart devices and speakers such as Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap, come with a plethora of capabilities.
Amazon announced on Wednesday plans to shut down its global website ranking system and competitor analysis tool "Alexa.com", which has been available for 25 years. Alexa.com is a subsidiary company of Amazon and it's widely known for its global ranking system which uses web traffic data from its partners to list the most popular internet companies.