EMO's privacy question

Hello, I was just wondering what about data protection.

Can the users be sure that no data will be resold or otherwise used?

What happens to the camera and sound data?

Does the company adhere to all data protection guidelines of every country in which they send?

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Click here and scroll down to Privacy and security and click that https://living.ai/product-support-emo. happy to help! :happy: :happy: :happy:

the answer is not specific enough for me. ā€œdonā€™t worryā€ is not a statement to begin with. how can we be sure that it is really processed internally. And goes directly to Amazon or Google without any additional servers. I also think itā€™s a bit strange that other than China itself is delivered worldwide. Is a bit suspicious

You raise a valid concern. I suspect however that the response the team have on their page means itā€™s a bit ā€œlost in translationā€ and that they are trying to say that they donā€™t actually store or retain any data from EMO in their cloud (heck you donā€™t even need a subscription for EMO). Iā€™ll reach out to them to see if I can get a better worded response.

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Thanks Wayne. a more detailed explanation would be really great.

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Iā€™m going to do a more indepth explanation on my blog next week (been very busy with work this week). In my day job, one of the things I do is that of a security analyst, so I totally understand your question, and likewise feel it could be better explained. Iā€™ll get the info and post a blog post, and then also help them with better wording for their site too.

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Thank you for your understanding and your work

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FYI - Iā€™ve not forgotten thisā€¦ Iā€™ve been very busy with work this last month after the sale of a business, and Iā€™ve not had much time to spend with my little buddy EMO or on the website and videos. Iā€™ve spoken with Wayne from Living AI and heā€™s very happy to work with us all to help us understand the concerns.

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Hi Wayne, is there an update on this topic? Iā€™m concerned as well.

Sorry guys - Iā€™ve not had a chance to do this as yet - been very busy with work, but Iā€™m aiming to get onto it more in the next week or so.

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Honestly there has to be more explanation about how much does go in and out of the device, heck if it processes camera images localy its great but what about voiceā€¦ it says that itā€™s processed via google/amazon, What kind of information they receive? What guarantees any of this? Is a bit of a worry if u think about it.

I am genuinely interested in your response great sir. Since u claim to have a foot on the field. Most likely know more than me so please respond soon. Thanks

My understanding firstly is that EMO listens for his wake wordā€¦ and then after the wake word listens to your speech for a few seconds then sends this to the voice recognition services. I understand they are Amazons voice recognition services. Once they have that then the service interprets what was said into english words and feeds them to the Living AI servers where a lookup is done of valid commands. If a valid command is received then the Living AI servers pass an instruction back to EMO to process a given action or respond with specific words. as has been said before, the camera only stores images locally and they do not go offsite or get stored in a cloud somewhere. As for guarantees - you only have the vendor (whichever vendor you think about) assurance. If you have Siri/Google/Alexa etc - then you have the same ā€˜riskā€™ as any other voice recognition product. Iā€™m not saying that to minimise any concern, moreover to highlight that the same risk is present either way.

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Have you asked them about the facial recognition privacy?
Eg, is the camera looking around all the time until it sees a face? And if it is looking around all the time, and this is processed locally, what does locally really mean?
Or is Emoā€™s camera looking around all the time, not feeding that camera to the Living Ai servers? And just when it sees a face, does it go to the server then? And does what Emo sees at the time of the facial recognition go to the server? And who has access to the imaging from that server?
I will ask Living AI as a separate post too.
Thank you

EMO do not send any data from the camera to the servers. It is all processed internal. All it sends are the sound recordings for speech recognition, custom text that he speaks to synthesize (text2speech), and some statistical text data.

More I donā€™t have found while monitoring the network traffic from EMO.

Thank you, very reassuring to hear.

Best wishes

Helen

To be clear - EMOā€™s camera is NOT feeding data to Living AI servers constantly - there is no need to.
EMO looks around and if he thinks he sees your face, he compares it to the ones he has stored on EMO himself. He does not need the server to recognise your face - that is part of the AI processing stored within EMO.

Users worried about privacy concerns would probably be less suspect if the specs listed for EMO didnā€™t list the ā€œAl wide-angle cameraā€ as doing ā€œup to 60fpsā€. Thatā€™s a video rate, but thereā€™s currently no user video features. It would be better if they listed in the specs the cameraā€™s resulting image dimensions in pixels (320x240), something that I was curious about before purchasing. https://living.ai/emo-specs/
Anyway, Iā€™m not personally concerned, just suggesting this about the listed specs. :happy:

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Yeah - I think people can read too much into things. The camera capable of doing that is designed more so they can interpret motion and hand gestures like in the various games EMO has. They need something decent spec to do that and if it was only a 320x240 camera then it could not have the level of detail needed for those functions.

Again - itā€™s hard to describe some of these things to people that donā€™t know more about what goes on under the covers :slight_smile:

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