Your Smart Digital Assistant Is Spying on You

Convenience or Security? You can rarely have both. Alexa and Siri can hear this hidden command, but you can’t

Researchers can send secret audio instructions, undetectable to the human ear, to artificial-intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers. They could command them to dial phone numbers or open websites.

And if recent history has shown us anything, once researchers prove that some bit of security can be breached, it probably will be, at least targeting high-value targets, like politicians, and celebrities.

In the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence (AI) systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.

The various companies have said that they have mechanisms to guard against this, such as Apple saying that the iPhone and iPad need to be unlocked to accept commands, but if your using your iPad to read, while music is playing... In the war against security, I usually bet on the hackers. (Who do you think invented the internet? Al Gore?)