2019 was the year of voice assistant privacy dumpster fires

2019 was the "I Told You So" year for privacy advocates and voice assistants: the year in which every company that wanted you to trust them to put an always-on mic in the most intimate places in your home was revealed to have allowed thousands of low-waged contractors to listen in on millions of clips, many of them accidentally recorded: first it was Amazon (and again!), then Google, then Apple, then Microsoft.

What's more, these arms-length contractors who were getting your stolen audio were working under terrible conditions, in sweatshops where they were worked long hours, listening to potentially traumatizing audio, subjected to wage theft. And when the tech giants cut them off, they got shafted again. And despite the companies' protests that they're the only ones stealing your data, voice assistants have proven to be no more secure than any of Big Tech's other products (cue "Dumpster Fires R Us").

In a long, end-of-year wrapup of the state-of-the-leaky-smart-speaker, Bloomberg pieces together a coherent narrative from all of these fragmentary accounts, trying to assess how we got here. The story goes like this: true believers in voice computing (often inspired by science fiction, such as Jeff Bezos, whose enthusiasm for Alexa is attributed to his ardent Star Trek fandom) start to build voice assistants in full knowledge that these will not only be perceived as creepy, they will be creepy. They mislead the contractors who transcribe samples of commands into thinking that they're listening to fully informed beta-testers, but it's totally obvious that these are real customers who have no idea they're being listened in on. Read the rest