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What You Say to Google Assistant and Alexa (but Not Siri) Gets Used for Ad Targeting. Here’s How.
Voice assistants can profile you based on your interactions, a new study finds

By Kaveh Waddell
September 9, 2023
Voice assistant logos on brains generating line drawings of people.
Illustration: Chris Griggs/Consumer Reports, Getty Images
You may be used to the fact that as you move around the internet, what you read, view, and click on is being tracked by tech companies. That’s why those shoes you shopped for weeks ago keep popping up in ads on recipe sites, and why your Instagram feed is full of eerily on-the-nose ads.

But what happens when you use voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, or Apple’s Siri? If you have a smart speaker in your kitchen, does its manufacturer use your questions and commands to feed its marketing databases with information about you?

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The answer is often yes, according to a new study from Northeastern University in Boston, which found evidence that Google and Amazon—but not Apple—use your voice interactions to draw conclusions about you. Based on what you say to the devices, Google infers things like your marital status and homeowner status, while Amazon notes products you may be interested in.

The data gathered from voice assistants are just one more way that Google and Amazon collect information on their users, supplementing the data they glean from what people do on their phones and laptops.

These details are valuable to marketers, who pay for the privilege of using the companies’ wide-reaching ad platforms to target people they think are most likely to buy their products. This means your requests to Alexa or Google Assistant can influence the ads you’ll see online.

Your requests can also change how Google Assistant responds to you later, Northeastern found.

What the Researchers Did
To figure out just how voice assistants profile you, researchers spent hours creating fake user personas on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. (Consumer Reports partly funded the study.)

They asked each assistant a series of questions designed to give lots of hints about the personas’ demographics. For example, asking for “family trip destinations” was meant to suggest that the hypothetical user was married; “apartments near Boston” could show that the user rents their home.

Next, the team looked to see how each company had categorized the user personas. Google makes it easy to see those categories—they appear on the company’s My Ad Center page—but Amazon and Apple make you request a download of your user data, a process that can take days.

Outcomes varied. Google usually assigned the tags the researchers expected, but not always: It consistently assigned the “homeowner” tag to personas who asked about topics like mortgage payments, but it tagged some users as “single” after when they asked for things like Disney tickets for a family. In real life, if Google gets a user’s profile tags wrong, that person might get less relevant ads and search results in the future.

Like Google, Amazon uses demographic data to help target ads and product recommendations to consumers—but unlike Google, Amazon doesn’t appear to infer that data from your interactions with Alexa, the researchers found. Instead, Amazon only categorizes Alexa users with the product categories it thinks they might be interested in.

Another big difference: Amazon only seems to profile users based on shopping actions, like adding items to a cart. So when the research team used Alexa to add dresses or shoes to their wish list or shopping cart, those personas were tagged as interested in fashion, beauty, and personal care.

But questions about renter’s insurance didn’t land Alexa users in the “renter” bucket. It appears that unless you’re specifically shopping, you can talk to Alexa without Amazon using that back-and-forth to add to the marketing data it keeps on you.

Siri, for its part, didn’t appear to connect any tags directly to users at all. Siri requests aren’t connected to your Apple ID, according to Apple’s policies, and they aren’t used to build a marketing profile. Apple does have a limited advertising network, but it seems to use only nonvoice clues like your account information and in-app behavior to target those ads.

“Consumers generally don’t know what to expect from their voice assistants when it comes to data privacy,” says David Choffnes, the Northeastern computer science professor who led the research. “There’s no way for them to know exactly what each platform is doing without experiments like this, so there is an urgent need for better transparency in this space.”

How Profiling Affects Your Ads and Interactions
Once you’ve been tagged with interest categories or demographic characteristics, your digital world might start looking a little different.

Google uses details about its users to help determine what ads they see, whether on its own products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube, or elsewhere on the internet. Google ads have an extremely broad reach: Tens of millions of websites and apps use its ad technology. Amazon, for its part, lets companies use details about you to show you ads on Amazon.com, other Amazon products like Twitch and Fire TV, and on third-party sites that use its ad network.

Interacting with voice assistants isn’t the only way your profile gets tagged by tech companies. More commonly, you’ll be tagged based on things like your search history, shopping activity, what websites you visit, and location. But the intimate, conversational nature of these interactions might lead you to expect that your voice requests are treated differently. (Conversely, you might worry that your smart speaker is recording everything you say. That’s not true, but you can take steps to boost your privacy while using the devices.)

“When we interact with these devices, we naturally expect that what we say to our assistants goes no further than the sound of our voice. However, that’s simply not the case,” Choffnes says. “Instead, we find that these assistants are collecting data about us, and sometimes building profiles about who we are, what we’re interested in, where we want to go.”

In certain cases, all this user profiling can affect how the digital assistants react to you. Northeastern found that Google provided different answers to some questions depending on what it thought it knew about you.

When the persona profiled as a married homeowner asked for restaurant recommendations, for example, the assistant suggested Eddie V’s Prime Seafood, a nationwide chain that’s in Google’s most expensive restaurant category. (At Eddie V’s, a branzino dish costs $43 and the lobster costs $106.) But the user profiled as single got a suggestion for Mida, a midpriced restaurant a block from Northeastern’s campus, where entrees are all between $20 and $30.

Google says users benefit from getting answers and ads that are targeted specifically at them. “We want your experience with Google Assistant to be as helpful as possible,” a Google spokesperson told CR in a statement. “Depending on your device and account setting choices, Assistant may use your data to create a more personalized experience.”

Of the three assistants in the study, Google was the only one that changed its answers based on a user’s persona.

Even though Amazon tagged Alexa users in response to some interactions, Alexa didn’t change its answers to basic questions based on those tags. But shopping actions caused Amazon to recommend similar items in the future, just as it would if a user put something in their Amazon.com cart on a laptop.

“Similar to other Amazon services, we may use customers’ interactions with Alexa to provide more relevant ads,” a company spokesperson told CR. “For example, if you ask Alexa to order paper towels or for recipe ideas, you might see or hear ads related to cleaning products or cooking utensils.”

And, as you’d guess based on the fact that Apple didn’t appear to use Siri interactions to tag users with interests or demographic profiles, it didn’t change Siri’s answers based on who was asking. Choffnes says Siri is the most privacy-preserving option for most people, based on this experiment.

What You Can Do
If you use Google Assistant or Alexa, you can see what each company thinks it knows about you.

Google shows your profile tags on its My Ad Center page. Once you sign in, you’ll see demographic tags like relationship status or homeowner status; you’ll also see topics and companies Google thinks you’re interested in.
Amazon makes it much harder to see your profile. You’ll need to download your personal data from Amazon’s Privacy Central; in the drop-down menu, choose “advertising” and then click “submit request.” It can take several days for Amazon to email you a link to download the data you’ve requested. Once you get your data, look for comma-separated values (.csv) files labeled Advertising.AmazonAudiences and Advertising.3PAudience.
Apple allows you to download your data from its Data and Privacy portal, but you won’t find anything about profiling in those materials.
Find that your interests and demographics are tagged incorrectly? Google allows you to change tags you think are incorrect, but Amazon doesn’t. You can change or delete Google tags that aren’t right in the My Ad Center.

If you want to opt out of targeted advertising entirely, you can do that too. Doing so will go further than just limiting how companies can use your voice assistant interactions—it’ll stop them from using any details they’ve guessed about you to choose what advertising you see. (It won’t reduce advertising, though—you’ll just get more generic ads.)

Google’s My Ad Center has a small drop-down at the top you can use to turn off personalized ads.
Amazon’s ad preferences page has an easy toggle for turning off what Amazon calls “interest-based ads.”
Apple provides directions for how to opt out of targeted advertising on each of your Apple devices.

LogicallyRight Loc: Chicago

Good information there