Misinformation in third-party voice applications

Bispham, Mary and Sattar, Suliman Kalim and Zard, Clara and Ferrer-Aran, Xavier and Edu, Jide and Suarez-Tangil, Guillermo and Such, Jose; Lee, Minha and Munteanu, Cosmin, eds. (2023) Misinformation in third-party voice applications. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, CUI 2023. ACM, New York, NY.. ISBN 9798400700149 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604307)

[thumbnail of Bispham-etal-CUI-2023-Misinformation-in-third-party-voice-applications]
Preview
 Text. Filename: Bispham_etal_CUI_2023_Misinformation_in_third_party_voice_applications.pdf
Accepted Author Manuscript
License: Strathprints license 1.0
Download (156kB)| Preview

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential for spreading misinformation via third-party voice applications in voice assistant ecosystems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Our work fills a gap in prior work on privacy issues associated with third-party voice applications, looking at security issues related to outputs from such applications rather than compromises to privacy from user inputs. We define misinformation in the context of third-party voice applications and implement an infrastructure for testing third-party voice applications using automated natural language interaction. Using our infrastructure, we identify — for the first time — several instances of misinformation in third-party voice applications currently available on the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa platforms. We then discuss the implications of our work for developing measures to pre-empt the threat of misinformation and other types of harmful content in third-party voice assistants becoming more significant in the future.

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)