A comprehensive privacy policy analysis of voice applications on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms by Clemson researchers has received recognitions from both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant teams. The results show that a substantial number of problematic privacy policies exist in these two mainstream voice assistant platforms. Google awarded the team a bug bounty for reporting the discovery.
The research paper, entitled “Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications,” was awarded Distinguished Paper Award at the 2020 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). ACSAC is an academic conference focused on practical computer security. Papers published in this conference discuss real-world problems in computer security, proposing solutions to mitigate or solve them. This year, the conference had an acceptance rate of 23% based on 302 submissions and 70 accepted papers. 
This work has also been reported by The Register and other tech news sites. The work was performed by Clemson School of Computing researchers Assistant Professor Long Cheng (pictured), Song Liao, Christin Wilson, Hongxin Hu, and Huixing Deng.
