ODW23C33 – Smart Assistants and the Constitutional Expectations in the Smart Age
Every day, smart assistants like Siri and Alexa respond to routine requests. Can the government compel disclosure of a user’s data in their smart devices? If so, under what circumstances?
Course Category: On-Demand Webinars
Course Level: Intermediate
CLE Credit: Substantive
CLE Hours: 1.5
Fees: $49 for Members and $70 for Nonmembers
Course Materials: Conference recording and a PDF of the PowerPoint slides.
Description: Every day, smart assistants like Siri and Alexa respond to routine requests. They call Uber, order pizza, and so on. What about this request: “Alexa, who killed John?” Is that request going too far? No, actually. That very question was the subject of a murder prosecution in Arkansas. A victim died in a home that had Alexa operational. The police suggested that, while recording its user’s voice commands, Alexa also captured other background sounds—possibly the critical moments of a crime. The police demanded the user’s Alexa data from Amazon. In another case, the FBI wanted to access a user’s iPhone, so it asked a court to force Apple to create software to break into the iPhone. Considered together, those two cases compel us to consider and answer two questions. Can the government compel disclosure of a user’s data in their smart devices? If so, under what circumstances?
Course Year: 2023