Intelligent Virtual Assistants: A Look at Their Privacy Issues

The common adoption of Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) raises the question about the privacy protection they offer to sensitive data. This work focuses on determining if users are aware of the access and options that they and third-parties have over their data shared with their IVAs. We conducted a survey to 43 IVA users and found out that more than 50% don’t know about third-party access to their data and less than 25% have never managed their IVA interaction data stored in their accounts. Additionally, we reviewed the stored data of 14 participants to learn about the effects of accidental triggering on the privacy of users (for instance, unwanted recording of personal conversations) and which IVA (Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa) gets less accidental triggering. In this regard, we detected that Google Assistant performed worse than Alexa but had less unwanted audio recordings, unlike Alexa that, with fewer accidental triggers, recorded personal conversations for longer times.