Amazon Echo may be the key to solving a murder in Bentonville, Arkansas. The popular smart device was found in the same house the murder took place in. Police ended up seizing the device to attempt to use the recordings to find any clues as to how the altercation occurred.

The Amazon Echo is a smart device that is able to record audio to answer questions or requests. The device does not have any direct access point for storage retrieval, like an SD card or drive. The lack of hard memory on the device may prove difficult to access the 4 gigabytes of data that is stored on the device’s motherboard, which is fairly inaccessible.

The data, however, can be retrieved through the Amazon Echo companion app, where it stores textual versions of each request. Yet it has not been disclosed if the app has stored the recordings from the crime scene. There is one question that most people have about this issue, “could police pull data from peoples devices like cellphones that could prove to be illegal?” The situation has caused the controversy to grow over police recovering private devices such as cellphones to investigate for illegal activity.