Smart speaker privacy control - acoustic tagging for personal voice assistants

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Cheng, Peng and Bagci, Ibrahim Ethem and Yan, Jeff and Roedig, Utz; (2019) Smart speaker privacy control - acoustic tagging for personal voice assistants. In: 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). Proceedings - 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, SPW 2019 . IEEE, USA, pp. 144-149. ISBN 9781728135083 (https://doi.org/10.1109/SPW.2019.00035)

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Abstract

Personal Voice Assistants (PVAs) such as the Siri, Amazon Echo and Google Home are now commonplace. PVAs continuously monitor conversations which may be transported to a cloud back end where they are stored, processed and maybe even passed on to other service providers. A user has little control over this process. She is unable to control the recording behaviour of surrounding PVAs, unable to signal her privacy requirements to back-end systems and unable to track conversation recordings. In this paper we explore techniques for embedding additional information into acoustic signals processed by PVAs. A user employs a tagging device which emits an acoustic signal when PVA activity is assumed. Any active PVA will embed this tag into their recorded audio stream. The tag may signal a cooperating PVA or back-end system that a user has not given a recording consent. The tag may also be used to trace when and where a recording was taken. We discuss different tagging techniques and application scenarios, and we describe the implementation of a prototype tagging device based on PocketSphinx. Using the popular PVA Google Home Mini we demonstrate that the device can tag conversations and that the tagging signal can be retrieved from conversations stored in the Google back-end system.

  • Item type:Book Section
    ID code:79332
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    19 September 2019
    Published
    23 May 2019
    Published Online
    1 February 2019
    Accepted
    Notes:© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
    Subjects:Science > Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science
    Technology
    Department:Faculty of Science > Computer and Information Sciences
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:27 Jan 2022 13:37
    Last modified:19 Dec 2024 11:21
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/79332
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