A judge from New Hampshire state in the US has ordered Amazon to turn over two days of Amazon Echo recordings that could help the authorities in the ongoing investigation of a double murder in which a man has been accused to have killed two women at a house on January 27 last year. The judge is said to believe that the Amazon Echo device may have made some recording from January 27, the day the women were killed, until January 29, when the police found the victims tucked beneath a tarp under the porch.
Prosecutors believe that recordings from an Amazon Echo may yield further clues to their killer. The police have already seized the Echo when they secured the crime scene but the recordings are stored on Amazon servers. According to TechCrunch, the order granting the search warrant said that there is “probable cause to believe” that the Echo picked up “audio recordings capturing the attack” and “any events that preceded or succeeded the attack.” Amazon has also been directed to turn over any “information identifying any cellular devices that were linked to the smart speaker during that time period.”
Amazon reportedly has told the Associated Press that it won’t release the information “without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us.” Amazon is also said to follow Apple’s footsteps by making users’ privacy a priority. According to The Washington Post, an Amazon spokesman indicated that the company would not turn over the data so easily, “appearing to prioritize consumer privacy as it has done in the past.”