Archives for July 3, 2019

A US senator asked questions, and Amazon provided answers you might not want to hear.

If you have hangups about Amazon and privacy on its smart assistant, Alexa, you’re not alone. Even after Amazon sent answers to a US senator who had questions about how the tech giant retains voice data and transcripts, the lawmaker remains concerned about Alexa’s privacy practices.

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as well as what the data gets used for. The letter came after CNET’s report that Amazon kept transcripts of interactions with Alexa, even after people deleted the voice recordings.

The deadline for answers was June 30, and Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, sent a response on June 28. In the letter, Huseman tells Coons that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they’re manually deleted by users.

Huseman also noted that Amazon had an “ongoing effort to ensure those transcripts do not remain in any of Alexa’s other storage systems.” But there are still records from some conversations with Alexa that Amazon won’t delete, even if people remove the audio, the letter revealed.

Privacy concerns aren’t just limited to voice assistants, not with smart technology finding its way into more household items like doorbells and locks. And tech companies aren’t always up front about what kind of data they collect or how much control you have over it.

“The American people deserve to understand how their personal data is being used by tech companies, and I will continue to work with both consumers and companies to identify how to best protect Americans’ personal information,” Coons said in a statement.

When reached for comment, Amazon referred to the letter for details.

In the letter to Coons, Amazon noted that for Alexa requests that involve a transaction, like ordering a pizza or hailing a rideshare, Amazon and the skill’s developers can keep a record of that transaction. That means that there’s a record of nearly every purchase you make on Amazon’s Alexa, which can be considered personal information.

Other requests, including setting reminders and alarms, would also remain saved, Huseman noted, saying that this was a feature customers wanted.

“Customers would not want or expect deletion of the voice recording to delete the underlying data or prevent Alexa from performing the requested task,” Huseman said in his letter.

That feature raised concerns among privacy advocacy groups, which discovered that Alexa’s “Remember” feature didn’t delete information stored unless people called Amazon’s customer service to delete the entire profile. Amazon said it’s since fixed the issue and called it a bug.

The answers didn’t exactly inspire confidence in Amazon for Coons.

“Amazon’s response leaves open the possibility that transcripts of user voice interactions with Alexa are not deleted from all of Amazon’s servers, even after a user has deleted a recording of his or her voice,” the lawmaker said in a statement. “What’s more, the extent to which this data is shared with third parties, and how those third parties use and control that information, is still unclear.”

Amazon said it uses the transcripts for training its voice assistant, and also so customers can know what Alexa thought it heard for voice commands. Those transcripts aren’t anonymized — Amazon explained that they’re associated with every user’s account.

A recent survey finds that millions of people are potentially confused about their phones and the cell service they have.

It’s not just Uncle Larry who’s confused. Potentially millions of people don’t appear to understand whether their smartphone is capable of running on 5G wireless technology, or whether they’re even surfing with it now or not.

Decluttr, a phone refurbishment service, surveyed 2,000 US smartphone owners in late May and found that about a third of respondents believed they had a device capable of 5G wireless connections. Of them, 40% were Apple iPhone owners (Apple hasn’t yet released a 5G iPhone), and 31% owned a Samsung device (Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G phone only went on sale a couple months ago, for $1,300). Moreover, 62% of those who thought they had a 5G-capable device say they’ve noticed improved mobile service.

The data is the latest sign of confusion over the next-generation wireless technology, which has only become available in some large cities like New York, Chicago, London, Sydney and Seoul. CNET’s own tests in 13 cities found the technology is living up to some of its hype, with speeds better than many people’s wired home internet connections. But coverage is spotty and inconsistent for now.

“Blazing speeds, a responsive network, and extensive coverage make up 5G’s Holy Grail,” wrote CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt. “And while carriers want to act fast to build out their networks, the customer should move slower. You may not have much of a choice if 5G isn’t live in your area.”

And for those who don’t, there appears to be a bit of confusion. Some of that is sown by the carriers themselves. AT&T, for example, has begun marketing “5G E” service, a rebranding and upgrade of its existing 4G LTE service, promising faster speeds. Some tests found AT&T’s 5G E was slower than competing 4G service. And in April, AT&T settled a false advertising suit with its competitor Sprint, which accused AT&T of “numerous deceptive tactics to mislead consumers” about 5G.

All that confusion appears to have taken a toll on the consumers that Decluttr surveyed, who may be overestimating the technology in their devices. Among those the firm surveyed, 46% of all customers on AT&T, 40% of those on T-Mobile and 27% of people on Verizon also believed they had a “5G capable” device.

“Whilst 5G may be the word on everyone’s lips, many Americans don’t truly understand this upgrade to the mobile network,” Decluttr said in a statement.

Representatives for Apple, Samsung and the various US carriers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The company is reportedly waiting for US Commerce Department approval to use Google’s OS after President Trump decided to ease restrictions on Huawei.

Huawei apparently doesn’t know yet whether it can use Google’s Android operating system in future mobile devices. This comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision over the weekend to relax restrictions on US companies selling equipment to the embattled Chinese phonemaker.

A Huawei executive said the company “will wait for guidance from the Department of Commerce” regarding Android, Reuters reported Monday. The Commerce Department is in charge of implementing the Trump administration’s restrictions.

Google briefly cut the phonemaker off from updates to its mobile OS after Trump’s executive order last month, but soon revived the relationship on a temporary basis.

Huawei has raised national security concerns in the US due to its relationship with Chinese government and suspicions that its gear could be used to spy on companies and other countries. Huawei has repeatedly denied this.

Huawei, in a statement emailed to CNET, acknowledged Trump’s most recent decision but said it has “no further comment at this time.” On Sunday, National Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow said that Huawei hasn’t been granted a “general amnesty” and that US companies can only sell widely available products to the company.

Reports suggest Huawei has a backup plan in case Google cuts it off permanently. It apparently has created its own OS, codenamed Hongmeng, and invited Google Play Store developers to publish apps on its own AppGallery digital store.

The Commerce Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Orion spacecraft has completed its final safety test. Next stop is the moon.

NASA has cleared the final hurdle in testing its Orion spacecraft with the completion of the Ascent Abort-2 flight test. The success marks an important milestone for the crew capsule that will put humans back on the moon, demonstrating its safety in an emergency abort scenario.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station early Tuesday morning, AA-2 was designed to push the capsule’s abort system to its limits with a full-stress test. And while full results of the test are still to be revealed, the capsule was jettisoned from the launch vehicle approximately 55 seconds post-launch, leaving a brilliant trail in the sky. Seconds later, the capsule landed in the ocean with an impressive splash that could be heard more than three miles away.

It was a humid morning in Florida, but Orion, perched on top of a solid-fuel rocket and encased in a fairing assembly, launched right on schedule at 4 a.m. PT. The capsule used for the test operated like a dummy spacecraft, weighted to resemble the real thing, but in effect was just an Orion-shaped box. It was positioned at the bottom of the upside-down golf tee-shaped Launch Abort System.

As it launched, we didn’t quite see the dazzling flurry of fire and flame we’ve become accustomed to with SpaceX launches but, of course, it wasn’t meant to be that way. This was a small test lasting only 3 minutes, aimed at ticking off a fundamental crew safeguard of the moon-bound craft.  

“Our Launch Abort System is a key safety feature of the spacecraft,” said Orion program manager Mark Kirasich prior to the test. “It will protect the crew members who fly on-board Orion during the most challenging part of the mission, which is the ascent phase.”  

Speaking to CNET in Florida shortly after the launch, Charlie Precourt, a former NASA space shuttle astronaut and head of the propulsion division at Northrop Grumman (the company that built the rocket systems for the abort test), said this was far from a simple test procedure. 

“I like to describe it as launching a rocket off of a flying rocket,” he said. “It’s tough enough to fly a rocket off a still launch pad — the launch pad for our launch abort system is actually a moving rocket at very high speeds, so it’s a very complicated set of computer algorithms that guide the firing of the motor.”

Compare that to the abort procedures in place during the shuttle era. On his four shuttle missions from 1993 to 1998, Precourt said, an abort would have required using the remaining thrust to guide the shuttle back into a gliding trajectory, and astronauts would have needed to “jump out the side like paratroopers.”

Now with Orion, which NASA is dubbing “the safest spacecraft ever built,” a safe abort at launch won’t involve jumping out the window. 

“It’s a dramatic improvement,” said Precourt. “It certainly expands the scenarios where we can get the crew back, when in the past we wouldn’t have been able to.”

Less than a minute into the flight, the abort sequence was initiated. By that time, the spacecraft had reached Mach 1.3 and hit 31,000 feet in altitude, just a few thousand feet lower than most commercial airliners fly. At that point, the abort motor fired and the crew module blasted away from the launch vehicle, escaping the chasing rocket before falling back to Earth. Once the LAS oriented itself in midflight, it ejected the Orion capsule into the ocean and blasted away. Orion did not contain any parachutes, so it came hurtling back toward the ocean and is set to sleep with the fishes. 

NASA has already run a number of high-end computer simulations that aim to stress-test the capsule to see how it fares during an abort. The data collected from the real flight will be analyzed in conjunction with those tests, thanks to a dozen data recorders that were jettisoned every 10 seconds as Orion began free-fall into the sea. 

Ascent Abort-2 was the last of three tests designed to evaluate the Orion capsule. Although emergency aborts are rather rare in crewed rocket launches, one did occur earlier this year when a Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned during ascent. That emergency resulted in a ballistic descent for NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin. “We have to prepare for this even though its a low likelihood of happening,” fellow astronaut Randy Bresnik noted in a prelaunch briefing.

The capsule is slated to fly, for the first time, aboard NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Space Launch System, in July 2020. That first flight will be uncrewed and last for approximately 25 days, with the Orion capsule spending around 10 days in orbit around the moon. Success in that mission will pave the way for the Artemis program to ready itself for first human spaceflight missions in 2022.