Skip to main content
Cornell University
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and all contributors. Donate
arxiv logo > cs > arXiv:2204.10920

Help | Advanced Search

arXiv logo
Cornell University Logo

quick links

  • Login
  • Help Pages
  • About

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2204.10920 (cs)
[Submitted on 22 Apr 2022 (v1), last revised 13 Oct 2023 (this version, v5)]

Title:Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo 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
View a PDF of the paper titled Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem, by Umar Iqbal and 9 other authors
View PDF
Abstract:Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by smart speaker platforms as well as third party skills supported on them. To bridge this gap, we build a framework to measure data collection, usage, and sharing by the smart speaker platforms. We apply our framework to the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem. Our results show that Amazon and third parties, including advertising and tracking services that are unique to the smart speaker ecosystem, collect smart speaker interaction data. We also find that Amazon processes smart speaker interaction data to infer user interests and uses those inferences to serve targeted ads to users. Smart speaker interaction also leads to ad targeting and as much as 30X higher bids in ad auctions, from third party advertisers. Finally, we find that Amazon's and third party skills' data practices are often not clearly disclosed in their policy documents.
Comments: Published at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2023
Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as: arXiv:2204.10920 [cs.CR]
  (or arXiv:2204.10920v5 [cs.CR] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.10920
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3618257.3624803
DOI(s) linking to related resources

Submission history

From: Umar Iqbal [view email]
[v1] Fri, 22 Apr 2022 20:21:21 UTC (2,631 KB)
[v2] Thu, 28 Apr 2022 06:59:35 UTC (1,486 KB)
[v3] Wed, 11 May 2022 02:55:20 UTC (1,473 KB)
[v4] Mon, 20 Feb 2023 05:08:02 UTC (1,390 KB)
[v5] Fri, 13 Oct 2023 20:11:21 UTC (1,539 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem, by Umar Iqbal and 9 other authors
  • View PDF
  • TeX Source
  • Other Formats
license icon view license
Current browse context:
cs.CR
< prev   |   next >
new | recent | 2022-04
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

  • NASA ADS
  • Google Scholar
  • Semantic Scholar
a export BibTeX citation Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

×
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy logo Reddit logo

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
  • Author
  • Venue
  • Institution
  • Topic

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)
  • About
  • Help
  • contact arXivClick here to contact arXiv Contact
  • subscribe to arXiv mailingsClick here to subscribe Subscribe
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Web Accessibility Assistance
  • arXiv Operational Status
    Get status notifications via email or slack