Attorneys working from home in the ongoing global Coronavirus pandemic are advised to mute or shut off listening devices as they run the risk of being heard by Amazon.com Inc. and Google.
Mishcon de Reya LLP, issued advise to staff not to have any devices like Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s voice assistant around them when they talk about confidential client matters at home.
The warning covers any kind of visual or voice-enabled device. But video products such as Ring, which is also owned by Amazon, and even baby monitors and closed-circuit TVs, are also a concern, said Mishcon de Reya partner Joe Hancock, who also heads the firm’s cybersecurity efforts.
“Perhaps we’re being slightly paranoid but we need to have a lot of trust in these organizations and devices,” Hancock said. “We’d rather not take those risks.”
Like Wall Street, law firms are facing challenges trying to impose secure work-from-home arrangements for certain job functions. Critical documents, including those that might be privileged, need to be secured. Meanwhile, in banking, some traders are being asked to work at alternative locations that banks keep on standby for disaster recovery instead of makeshift work-from-home stations to maintain confidentiality.
The errors made by smart-speakers, where they activate wrongly, make unintended purchases or send snippets of audio to Amazon or Google, have become a new source of risk for businesses.
Amazon and Google say their devices are designed to record and store audio only after they detect a word to wake them up. The companies say such instances are rare, but recent testing by Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that the devices can activate inadvertently between 1.5 to 19 times a day.
Tech companies have been under fire for compromising users’ privacy by having teams of human auditors listen to conversations without consent to improve their AI algorithms. Google has since said that users have to opt-in to let the tech giant keep any voice recordings made by the device. Amazon now lets its users set up automatic deletion of recordings and opt-out of manual review.
The law firm’s warning first surfaced on an Instagram account “justthequant,” where people share their intel and struggles of working from home.
*Source: Bloomberg