Alexa, Is My Data Safe? The (Ir)relevance of Privacy in Smart Speakers Reviews

Abstract

Smart speakers equipped with intelligent voice processing functions, like Siri and Amazon Echo, have become widespread globally. However, their recording and networking capabilities spur concerns about users’ privacy. In this research, we report the results of a text-mining analysis of customers’ perception of privacy in smart speakers. The corpus comprises over 4,500 reviews of the Echo line of smart speakers collected from Amazon. Smart speakers owners appear to be mostly oblivious to privacy issues since the fraction of those mentioning privacy in their reviews is largely below 3%. The average sentiment towards privacy is positive, though the average hides a significant fraction exhibiting a negative sentiment. However, those negative perceptions do not affect the overall sentiment polarity towards the product, which stays positive.