Poster: A First Look at the Privacy Risks of Voice Assistant Apps

In this study, we conduct the first study on the analysis of voice assistant (VA) apps. We first collect the metadata of VA apps from the VA app directory and analyze them. Next, we call VA apps by the corresponding voice commands and examine how they identify users by analyzing the responses from the apps. We found that roughly half of the VA apps performed user identification by some means. We also found that several apps aim to acquire personal information such as birth date, age, or the blood type through voice conversations. As such data will be stored in the cloud, we need to have a mechanism to ensure that an end-user can check/control the data in a usable way.