Amazon recently announced the removal of a privacy setting on its Echo devices that had allowed users to opt out of having their voice requests sent to the company’s cloud servers (Rascoe 2025). While users may still choose not to save voice requests, those requests will be sent to “Amazon’s secure cloud” before deletion. This policy change exacerbates the already serious privacy concerns that Echo and other “always-listening” devices (such as Apple’s HomePod and Google’s Home) raise. In order to do what they are designed to do, such systems continually listen for their “wake” word: a word that is designed to alert the device to listen and respond to user commands. Because they are always listening and frequently recording, these devices carry a high risk of inadvertently recording private conversations without consent. The privacy invasions made possible by these devices are significant, and ought to be taken seriously by both regulators and ordinary members of the public. In this paper, I explore the privacy concerns raised by “always-listening” devices by focusing on a case study: our increased reliance on Zoom meetings for professional and personal purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because many of us were newly on Zoom with classmates, coworkers, and friends during this period, we were newly exposed to others’ always-listening devices. Even those of us who had deliberately avoided always-listening devices for privacy reasons may have been unwittingly and unwillingly recorded while in Zoom meetings with others who had always-listening devices in their homes. While these privacy-oriented individuals may have consented (explicitly or implicitly) to being recorded for expressly educational purposes such as a class’s being recorded so an absent or sick student could watch it later, they are unlikely to have understood themselves as consenting to being recorded by an always-listening device. After arguing that these individuals’ privacy rights were likely violated, I draw implications for the regulation of always-listening devices. I argue that existing privacy laws provide affected individuals with little legal recourse, and that further legislative action in this area is required to protect citizens’ reasonable privacy concerns.
J. L. A. Donohue (Thu,) studied this question.