Technology

It didn&t hurt. I thought someone dropped a small cardboard box on my head. It felt sharp and light. I was sitting on the floor, along the back of the crowd, and then an Intel Shooting Star Mini drone dropped on my head.

Audi put on a massive show to reveal its first EV, the e-tron. The automaker went all out, putting journalists, executives and car dealers on a three-story paddle boat for a two-hour journey across the San Francisco Bay. I had a beer and two dumplings. We were headed to a long-vacated Ford manufacturing plant in Richmond, Calif.

By the time we reached our destination, the sun had set and Audi was ready to begin. Suddenly, in front of the boat, IntelShooting Star drones put on a show that ended with Auditrademark four ring logo. The show continued as music pounded inside the warehouse, and just before the reveal of the e-tron, IntelShooting Star Minis celebrated the occasion with a light show a couple of feet above attendees& heads.

Thatwhen one hit me.

Natalie Cheung, GM of Intel Drone Light Shows, told me they knew when one drone failed to land on its zone that one went rogue. According to Cheung, the Shooting Star Mini drones were designed with safety in mind.

&The drone frame is made of flexible plastics, has prop guards, and is very small,& she said. &The drone itself can fit in the palm of your hand. In addition to safety being built into the drone, we have systems and procedures in place to promote safety. For example, we have visual observers around the space watching the drones in flight and communicating with the pilot in real-time. We have built-in software to regulate the flight paths of the drones.&

After the crash, I assumed someone from Audi or Intel would be around to collect the lost drone, but no one did, and at the end of the show, I was unable to find someone who knew where I could find the Intel staff. I notified my Intel contacts first thing the following morning and provided a local address where they could get the drone. As of publication, the drone is still on my desk.

I have covered IntelShooting Star program since its first public show at Disney World in 2016. Ita fascinating program and one of the most impressive uses of drones I&ve seen. The outdoor shows, which have been used at The Super Bowl and the Olympics, are breathtaking. Hundreds of drones take to the sky and perform a seemingly impossible dance and then return home. A sophisticated program designates the route of each drone, GPS ensures each is where itsupposed to be and itcontrolled by just one person.

Intel launched an indoor version of the Shooting Star program at CES in 2018. The concept is the same, but these drones do not use GPS to determine their location. The result is something even more magical than the outside version because with the Shooting Star Minis, the drones are often directly above the viewers. Itan incredible experience to watch drones dance several feet overhead. It feels slightly dangerous. Thatthe draw.

And that poses a safety concern.

The drone that hit me is light and mostly plastic. It weighs very little and is about 6 inches by 4 inches. A cage surrounds the bottom of the rotors, though not the top. If therea power button, I can&t find it. The full-size drones are made out of plastic and Styrofoam.

Safety has always been baked into the Shooting Star programs, but I&m not sure the current protocols are enough.

I was seated on the floor along the back of the venue. Most of the attendees were standing, taking selfies with the performing drones. It was a lovely show.

When the drone came down on my head, it tumbled onto the floor and the rotors continued to spin. A member of the catering staff was walking behind the barrier I was sitting against, reached out and touched the spinning rotors. I&m sure shefine, but when her finger touched the spinning rotor, she jumped in surprise. At this point, seconds after it crashed, the drone was upside down, and like an upturned beetle, continued to operate for a few seconds until the rotors shut off.

To be clear, I was not hurt. And thatnot the point. Drone swarm technology is fascinating and could lead to incredible use cases. Swarms of drones could quickly and efficiently inspect industrial equipment and survey crops. And they make for great shows in outside venues. But are they ready to be used inside, above peopleheads I&m already going bald. I don&t need help.

Earlier this year we saw the headlines of how the users of popular voice assistants like Alexa and Siri and continue to face issues when their private data is compromised, or even sent to random people. In May it was reported that AmazonAlexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to a random contact. Amazon insists its Echo devices aren&t always recording, but it did confirm the audio was sent.

The story could be a harbinger of things to come when voice becomes more and more ubiquitous. After all, Amazon announced the launch of Alexa for Hospitality, its Alexa system for hotels, in June. News stories like this simply reinforce the idea that voice control is seeping into our daily lives.

The French startup Snips thinks it might have an answer to the issue of security and data privacy. Its built its software to run 100% on-device, independently from the cloud. As a result, user data is processed on the device itself, acting as a potentially stronger guarantor of privacy. Unlike centralized assistants like Alexa and Google, Snips knows nothing about its users.

Its approach is convincing investors. To date, Snips has raised €22 million in funding from investors like Korelya Capital, MAIF Avenir, BPI France and Eniac Ventures. Created in 2013 by 3 PhDs, and now employing more than 60 people in Paris and New York, Snips offers its voice assistant technology as a white-labelled solution for enterprise device manufacturers.

Ittested its theories about voice by releasing the result of a consumer poll. The survey of 410 people found that 66% of respondents said they would be apprehensive of using a voice assistant in a hotel room, because of concerns over privacy, 90% said they would like to control the ways corporations use their data, even if it meant sacrificing convenience.

&Сonsumers are increasingly aware of the privacy concerns with voice assistants that rely on cloud storage — and that these concerns will actually impact their usage,& says Dr Rand Hindi, co-founder and CEO at Snips. &However, emerging technologies like blockchain are helping us to create safer and fairer alternatives for voice assistants.&

Indeed, blockchain is very much part of Snipfuture. As Hindi told TechCrunch in May, the company will release a new set of consumer devices independent of its enterprise business. The idea is to create a consumer business that will prompt further enterprise development. At the same time, they will issue a cryptographic token via an ICO to incentivize developers to improve the Snips platform, as an alternative to using data from consumers. The theory goes that this will put it at odds with the approach used by Google and Amazon, who are constantly criticised for invading our private lives merely to improve their platforms.

As a result Hindi believes that as voice-controlled devices become an increasingly common sight in public spaces, there could be a significant shift in public opinion about how their privacy is being protected.

In an interview conducted last month with TechCrunch, Hindi told me the companyplans for its new consumer product are well advanced, and will be designed from the beginning to be improved over time using a combination of decentralized machine learning and cryptography.

By using blockchain technology to share data, they will be able to train the network &without ever anybody sending unencrypted data anywhere,& he told me.

And ‘training the network& is where it gets interesting. By issuing a cryptographic token for developers to use, Hindi says they will incentivize devs to work on their platform and process data in a decentralized fashion. They are starting from a good place. He claims they already have 14,000 developers on the platform who will be further incentivized by a token economy.

&Otherwise people have no incentive to process that data in a decentralized fashion, right& he says.

&We got into blockchain because we&re trying to find a way to get people to participate in decentralized machine learning. We&ve been wanting to get into consumer [devices] for a couple of years but didn&t really figure out the end goal because we had always had this missing element which was: how do you keep making it better over time.&

&This is the main argument for Google and Amazon to pretend that you need to send your data to them, to make the service better. If we can fix this [by using blockchain] then we can offer a real alternative to Alexa that guarantees Privacy by Design,& he says.

&We now have over 14000 developers building for us and thatreally completely organic growth, zero marketing, purely word of mouth, which is really nice because it shows that therea very big demand for decentralized voice assistance, effectively.&

It could be a high-risk strategy. Launching a voice-controlled device is one thing. Layering it with applications produced by developed supposedly incentivized by tokens, especially when crypto prices have crashed, is quite another.

It does definitely feel like a moonshot idea, however, and we&ll really only know if Snips can live up to such lofty ideals after the launch.

A new research report has raised concerns about how in-home smart devices such as AI virtual voice assistants, smart appliances, and security and monitoring technologies could be gathering and sharing childrendata.

It calls for new privacy measures to safeguard kids and make sure age appropriate design code is included with home automation technologies.

The report, entitled Home Life Data and ChildrenPrivacy, is the work of Dr Veronica Barassi of Goldsmiths, University of London, who leads a research project at the university investigating the impact of big data and AI on family life.

Barassi wants the UKdata protection agency to launch a review of what she terms &home life data& — meaning the information harvested by smart in-home devices that can end up messily mixing adult data with kids& information — to consider its impact on childrenprivacy, and &put this concept at the heart of future debates about childrendata protection&.

&Debates about the privacy implications of AI home assistants and Internet of Things focus a lot on the the collection and use of personal data. Yet these debates lack a nuanced understanding of the different data flows that emerge from everyday digital practices and interactions in the home and that include the data of children,& she writes in the report.

&When we think about home automation therefore, we need to recognise that much of the data that is being collected by home automation technologies is not only personal (individual) data but home life data… and we need to critically consider the multiple ways in which childrendata traces become intertwined with adult profiles.&

The report gives examples of multi-user functions and aggregated profiles (such as AmazonHousehold Profiles feature) as constituting a potential privacy risk for childrenprivacy.

Another example cited is biometric data — a type of information frequently gathered by in-home ‘smart& technologies (such as via voice or facial recognition tech) yet the report asserts that generic privacy policies often do not differentiate between adults& and childrenbiometric data. So thatanother grey area being critically flagged by Barassi.

Shesubmitted the report to the ICO in response to its call for evidence and views on anAge Appropriate Design Codeit will be drafting. This code is a component of the UKnew data protection legislation intended to support and supplement rules on the handling of childrendata contained within pan-EU privacy regulation — by providing additional guidance on design standards for online information services that process personal data and are &likely to be accessed by children&.

And itvery clear that devices like smart speakers intended to be installed in homes where families live are very likely to be accessed by children.

The report concludes:

There is no acknowledgement so far of the complexity of home life data, and much of the privacy debates seem to be evolving around personal (individual) data. It seems that companies are not recognizing the privacy implications involved in childrendaily interactions with home automation technologies that are not designed for or targeted at them. Yet they make sure to include children in the advertising of their home technologies. Much of the responsibility of protecting children is in the hands of parents, who struggle to navigate Terms and Conditions even after changes such as GDPR [the European Unionnew privacy framework]. It is for this reason that we need to find new measures and solutions to safeguard children and to make sure that age appropriate design code is included within home automation technologies.

&We&ve seen privacy concerns raised about smart toys and AI virtual assistants aimed at children, but so far there has been very little debate about home hubs and smart technologies aimed at adults that children encounter and that collect their personal data,& adds Barassi commenting in a statement.

&The very newness of the home automation environment means we do not know what algorithms are doing with this ‘messy& data that includes childrendata. Firms currently fail to recognise the privacy implications of childrendaily interactions with home automation technologies that are not designed or targeted at them.

&Despite GDPR, itleft up to parents to protect their childrenprivacy and navigate a confusing array of terms and conditions.&

The report also includes a critical case study of AmazonHousehold Profiles — a feature that allows Amazon services to be shared by members of a family — withBarassi saying she wasunable to locate any information on AmazonUS or UK privacy policies on how the company uses children&home life data& (e.g. information that might have been passively recorded about kids via products such as AmazonAlexa AI virtual assistant).

&It is clear that the company recognizes that children interact with the virtual assistants or can create their own profiles connected to the adults. Yet I can&t find an exhaustive description or explanation of the ways in which their data is used,& she writes in the report. &I can&t tell at all how this company archives and sells my home life data, and the data of my children.&

Amazon does make this disclosure on childrenprivacy— though it does not specifically state what it does in instances where childrendata might have been passively recorded (i.e. as a result of one of its smart devices operating inside a family home.)

Barassi also points out thereno linkto its childrendata privacy policy on the ‘Create your Amazon Household Profile& page — where the company informs users they can add up to four children to a profile, noting there is only a tiny generic link to its privacy policy at the very bottom of the page.

We asked Amazon to clarify itshandling of childrendata but at the time of writing the company had not responded to multiple requests for comment.

The EUnew GDPR framework does require data processors to take special care in handling childrendata.

In its guidance on this aspect of the regulation the ICO writes: &You should write clear privacy notices for children so that they are able to understand what will happen to their personal data, and what rights they have.&

The ICO also warns: &The GDPR also states explicitly that specific protection is required where childrenpersonal data is used for marketing purposes or creating personality or user profiles. So you need to take particular care in these circumstances.&