Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, and Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data

Authors

Anne Logsdon Smith, Catholic University of America (Student)Follow

Abstract

With over one-fourth of households in the U.S. alone now using voice-activated digital assistant devices such as Amazon’s Echo (better known as “Alexa”) and Google’s Home, companies are recording and transmitting record volumes of voice data from the privacy of people’s homes to servers across the globe. These devices capture conversations about everything from online shopping to food preferences to entertainment recommendations to bedtime stories, and even phone and appliance use. With “Big Data” and business analytics expected to be a $203 billion-plus industry by 2020, companies are racing to acquire and leverage consumer data by selling it, licensing it, and pledging it as collateral for financing. Given that data is the digital economy’s most valuable currency, it is no wonder that companies are engaging in fierce legal battles with each other for ownership, possession, and, in some cases, repossession of consumer data. Consumers themselves have asserted rights to data they allegedly generated, particularly when this data is disseminated in contravention of a company’s privacy policy – which some claim is violated by the simple act of collateralizing the company’s data assets.

Courts and legislatures have attempted to balance the various stakeholders’ interests in voice data through the legal frameworks of contracts, property, secured transactions, and statutes. This comment explores some of these conflicting interests and identifies the weaknesses in the predominant legal frameworks through which the chain of ownership is currently analyzed. This comment then proposes different ways of applying existing legal principles, as well as new federal legislation, to better align and distribute these interests. This comment concludes that property law’s legal framework is better-suited to address personal data ownership than contract law alone, since it allows shared ownership with multiple concurrent users of the same asset. Adjusting the process by which security interests in voice-captured data are created and enforced may also help protect the data’s integrity while minimizing unintended transfers that may harm consumers. Ultimately, statutory relief may be necessary to protect and restore certain rights to consumers in their own personal voice data.

Recommended Citation

Anne Logsdon Smith, Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, and Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, 27 Cath. U. J. L. & Tech 187 (2018).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol27/iss1/8