Your virtual home assistant can adjust your thermostat, give you reminders, answer your questions, and more – but can it provide evidence against you if you are accused of a crime? Or can that same evidence be used to show you are innocent of a crime?
The newest frontier of electronic discovery in criminal cases involves intelligent home assistants providing information about a defendant that may be used to prove or disprove criminal allegations. There are several different devices on the market including Google Home, Apple HomePod, or Amazon Echo. Any of these are constantly storing and gathering information, which can potentially be used as evidence in a criminal prosecution.
Listening and Recording
Home assistant devices are constantly recording, uploading, and processing information to better assist consumers. Wording of questions and voice inflections are analyzed to constantly improve speech recognition. Shopping lists and reminders are studied to better adapt to the needs of the user. Each company is striving to make its home assistant the most intelligent on the market and this requires recording a significant amount of information about users. While users know their information is being stored in the cloud, they rarely realize the potential implications of these recordings.
When you have a home assistant, you have the ability to “wake them up” by saying a specific word, often their “name.” You may believe that Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or any other character used by your device is asleep until you wake them up—but they have to be listening for the wake-up call. Often, even when they are not talking, these devices are actively listening and recording what is happening in your home.
Use as Evidence
The information gathered via home assistant can give significant insight into a person’s everyday life and activities, as well as when they stray from their usual routine. Asking about traffic, checking off to-do lists, inquiring about movie times, and much more can all shed light on when you were home (and talking to your assistant) as well as when you left home and your likely destination. This can help build and prove a timeline leading up to or following any crime, accident, or similar event and so can be invaluable as evidence. Furthermore, the home assistant might actually record evidence of a crime directly, whether is hears a crime in progress or someone speaking about the crime either before or after it happens.
However, obtaining the evidence gathered by these devices is not as simple as requesting the information from the cloud and submitting it as is. Potential issues regarding home assistant devices and the use of the recorded information as evidence include:
- If a user refuses to voluntarily disclose the stored information, can companies like
- Google and Amazon also refuse to disclose it as protected free speech under the First Amendment?
- When a device records a guest in a home without their knowledge, does disclosure violate their privacy rights?
- Is this information always reliable? Will parties begin manipulating information recorded by their home assistants in order to cover up a wrongdoing or legitimize a false narrative?
- If users can delete information, when should they be ordered not to destroy any potential evidence?
Whether evidence from a home assistant is being used for or against you in a criminal case, your attorney should know how to best utilize or defend against the information presented. In addition, they should be prepared to challenge the way the evidence was obtained or used by law enforcement.
With the race for technological innovation constantly accelerating, the possibilities for electronic evidence captured by home assistant devices will just keep developing. What once seemed far-fetched is now reality, as computers can now passively capture potential evidence that may be turned against their owners in criminal prosecutions. Although what comes next is yet to be seen, it is essential to have an attorney who stays up to date with technological developments and how they may be used in court to ensure you have the best representation possible.
If evidence from a home assistant device is being used against you or if that same evidence may demonstrate your innocence, you should call the experienced criminal defense team at Koffsky & Felsen, LLC today. Call the office at 203-327-1500 or contact us online to discuss your case.
