Alexa, What Happened to My Car?

▤ Summary

And even if they do establish biometric security features, Mr. Wang said, regenerative machine learning could use a recording of a person’s voice to synthesize new commands that could fool them. Timur Pulathaneli, Ford’s supervisor of connected vehicles and services, said that if it proved to be a nuisance, drivers could turn the feature off in the app so that Alexa would respond only after a button was pushed on the steering wheel. A person wouldn’t automatically be able to unlock a home’s front door from the car because such functions work only in conjunction with the owner’s smartphone (which they’d have to steal, too). “You can track where the car goes and at what times.” If compromised, Alexa could provide a criminal with details about a user’s purchases, driving habits and travel routines. All that information is sent back to Amazon’s servers and then shared with other companies, Travis Witteveen, chief executive of the security firm Avira, pointed out.

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