The Search Warrant for Echo's Data

As I mentioned in this week's blog posts, my students are becoming increasingly concerned over their smart phones and their privacy. To a teenager, their bedroom door use to provide them the utmost privacy and if it was ever removed from it's hinges, as we've seen in so many teen movies and shows, then they felt their live was ending! But I'm happy to say that teenagers are starting to see that their privacy is violated every day thanks to the thing they feel they can't live without: their phones. And the social media that access from it.

One article my students read was from Scholastic, all about how "Alexa" was being requested to testify during a murder trial. Basically the police wanted access to the information which brought up a whole plethora of constitutional issues.

I found this article that shed some more recent light on the issue: "Judge Orders Amazon to Turn Over Echo Recordings in Double Murder Case" by Zack Wittaker. The article details a judge's warrant to Echo data in solving a murder. Amazon originally refused, and would not oblige until presented with a clear warrant. This article addresses that, "Although Amazon publishes a biannual transparency report detailing the number of warrants and orders it receives across its entire business, the company doesn’t — and refuses — to break down how many requests for data it receives for Echo data."

This relates back to the Hangout we had in class this week-that one of the scariest things about all of this is what the Big Five are not telling us.

Comments

  1. This is a great find as an article, where the responsibility is for proving surveilled information for legal use, and how maybe laws might have to be modified to deal with examples not having very old precedents.

    I'm really interested in hearing more about your students expected state of privacy, and at least, it sounds like they are aware. Maybe this is near a possible topic for your project. The place is maybe different from the bedroom door analogy, is that things that happen on the phone are often done with the intent of (some) audience, of not being so private. We'd like to share safely with our [real] friends, right? This might tap into the Goffman reading on performance.

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