i'm not sure why location is the scary part here, i'm more concerned that real people and not just algorithms have access to my audio recordings or transcripts from alexa.
I worked a company with over a trillion dollars in assets that had hundreds of “highly confidential” (their own words for classification) that were available to anyone on the network.
I took all the appropriate courses of action to report, no action on their end. Reported it to the teams responsible and offered a solution, no action. I debated blowing a whistle and making an example, but I didn’t feel like I’d be safe.
This post even makes me paranoid.
In the sense that country and state or province might be close enough, it's certainly not accurate enough to nail down county, or zip code level accuracy with more than a coin flip's reliability.
Some IP addresses are well known, and bound to physical locations like places of business, retail store fronts, starbucks wi-fi, but that's not really the purview of home assistants, when discussing the meat of these services and their intentions.
> While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.
It's like when you're on the phone to some robot booking service and a real person takes over you're suddenly embarrassed to have been talking to the robot at all.
This is just very sloppy/lazy security.