Tech writer Andy Ihnatko joined Boston Public Radio on Thursday to speak about whether or not smart speakers are recording our conversations.
"Recent studies discovered that smart speakers are activating accidentally, because they're always waiting for a certain trigger word," he said. "But as far as secretly recording your conversations for marketing purposes, they didn't find any basis for that."
Smart speakers only start listening when they hear a command phrase, Ihnatko said.
"It's technically not feasible for a smart speaker to be recording you any other time than when you're giving it a command," he said. "These smart speakers have a special system on a chip that's only job is to listen to a phrase, and only when it hears that phrase will it sound an alarm and wake up the rest of the system."
