“Hey Google, am I being hacked?”

Voice assistants are peak convenience in the digital age. Turn up the heat? Yup. Turn down the music? Got you. Record a private conversation and send it to my contacts? Uh. Yeah, that did happen.

As handy as it is to have a Google Home or Amazon Echo in the kitchen, they do pose a bit of a security threat to digital life. The more we connect to them, to greater the vulnerabilities. Here are a few precautions you should take.

1. Don’t connect everything everything. Your lights, thermostat and Spotify account are fine, but a door lock or surveillance camera activated by voice is asking for trouble.
2. Wipe their memory. Smart speakers learn common commands, so you should regularly listen to past commands and erase them in case there’s sensitive info stored.
3. Mute your device. Just turning off the microphone stops it from listening in on conversations when it’s not in use.
4. Password protect purchases. Smart speakers can buy you stuff – so use a secret purchase password.
5. Turn off personal results. If you use a voice assistant to pay your bills, you could be exposing your passwords and bank account numbers. Switch off this feature to be safe.

What to know more about what we do at Intega IT? Contact us at info@intega.ca.