What voice assistants like Alexa know about you – and how they use it

By simulating fake people while interacting with popular smart voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, researchers have uncovered the different approaches each system takes to learning users’ personal preferences and habits.

“I don’t know that consumers have the intuition that when you’re talking out loud, that also could potentially be used to profile you and then target you with ads,” says David Choffnes at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.