Amazon gives up fight for Alexa’s First Amendment rights after murder defendant hands over data

3-7-17 Arkansas:

Amazon has abandoned its legal battle to protect its Alexa assistant with First Amendment rights — for now at least.

The company filed a motion against a police search warrant in an Arkansas murder case earlier this month, but has now dropped the case after the defendant agreed to hand over the data contained on his Echo speaker to police.

In documents filed last Monday, defendant James Andrew Bates said that he was willing to allow law enforcement officials to review information contained on his Amazon Echo speaker, before the company handed the data over on Friday.

Bates has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Victor Collins, who was found dead in Bates' hot tub in November 2015

Do Robots Have Free Speech? Amazon Says Yes

2-23-17:

On December 15, 1791, when the U.S. government passed the first amendment and guaranteed freedom of speech, legislators were not thinking about Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant.

The question now is: Should they have been?

People enjoy rights such as free speech in the United State and other countries around the world, and corporations are legally considered people for many purposes. But what about agents, smart digital assistants, and robots? As the field of artificial intelligence continues to grow and engineers pair it with natural language processing, we are increasingly seeing a voice-first future computer interface driven by intelligent assistants.

And that matters, because where AI is answering, AI had to be listening. And when AI listens, sometimes it hears sensitive material.

Alexa Privacy FAQ: Here's What It Knows About You

2-23-17:

When law enforcement came knocking for the digital records of an Alexa user recently, a lot of people went into panic mode. Is that ever-handy Amazon Echo and its team of Echo Dots working against you as digital a digital spy?

Not quite. It’s true that the Echo is always listening and records your voice commands when you ask Alexa a question. And of course that information is saved to Amazon’s cloud and will be used to try and provide you with better services.

But taking some time to learn about how the Echo works, how Amazon saves your data, and how to delete it, you’ll have less trepidation that chatting with your Echo will generate an Exhibit A against you in the future.

Q: HOW DOES ALEXA WORK?

There is a ton of other info so click HERE to read it.