Amazon gives up fight for Alexa’s First Amendment rights after defendant hands over data
Amazon has abandoned its legal battle to protect its Alexa assistant with First Amendment rights — for now at least. The company filed a motion
against a police search warrant in an Arkansas murder case earlier this
month, but has now dropped the case after the defendant agreed to hand
over the data contained on his Echo speaker to police.
In documents filed last Monday, defendant James Andrew
Bates said that he was willing to allow law enforcement officials to
review information contained on his Amazon Echo speaker, before the
company handed the data over on Friday. Bates has pleaded not guilty to
the murder of Victor Collins, who was found dead in Bates’ hot tub in
November 2015
Police had issued a warrant to seize subscriber and
account information from Bates’ Echo, as well as all communication and
transaction history from the device. Amazon provided the former, but
argued against providing communication data, claiming that voice
interactions with Alexa were protected by the First Amendment. That
includes Alexa’s replies to a user — Amazon claims that ranked search
results are “constitutionally protected opinion.” Precedent for that
argument was set by a 2014 case
in which Google search results were classified as “free speech” by a
San Francisco court, after a news website complained that its own pages
were too far down the company’s listings.
Amazon argued that police didn’t have enough of a
compelling argument in Bates’ case for it to hand over the data, with
officials unable to prove that any potential information would not be
available anywhere else. It remains to be seen whether Bates’ Echo does
indeed have any pertinent information — a hearing is scheduled for
Wednesday this week. The defendant’s acquiescence also means that we
don’t yet have a definitive answer on whether Alexa is indeed protected
by the First Amendment.
The article was published on : theverge
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