In the later half of the previous year, Amazon’s Echo device had turned out to be an important evidence in the investigation of a murder which dated back to 2015. This happened when the police sought access to voice recordings from the smart home assistant. And now, the e-commerce behemoth is taking a step back, stating that protected speech is constituted by both user commands and Alexa’s responses and as such, it should not be bound to produce them as evidence.
This particular Amazon Echo became an important component of the 2015’s murder case investigation after the police seized the device with the prospect of gaining some clues regarding that late November night which witnessed the death of Arkansas resident Victor Collins.
In a legal document issued late last week, the company has shown a negative attitude towards the requests, stating that while it has already acquiesced to their request regarding the user purchase history, it won’t like going any further.
Given the important First Amendment and privacy implications at stake, the warrant should be quashed unless the Court finds that the State has met its heightened burden for compelled production of such material
Amazon explains that they have no intent of providing any hindrance to the legal proceedings, but releasing the contents the government bodies are seeking for is by all means a violation of consumer privacy rights, quoting a ruling in which the company was involved back in 2010,
The fear of government tracking and censoring one’s reading, listening and viewing choices chills the exercise of First Amendment rights.
On that ground, ACLU and Amazon debated over the fact that the First Amendment prevented Amazon from having to hand over customer records to the North Carolina Department of Revenue.
The filing also talks about Echo’s popularity, utilizing the context for both self promotion as well as building grounds to the suggestion that disclosing such information may prove to be a bad example as these devices are very popular in households and soak up a lot of conversations. If Amazon was to give the data that it recorded, it could lead to a lot of controversy around the microphone-sporting cloud-connected devices.
