Is your Christmas gift spying on you?

A homicide case out of Arkansas raises new questions about privacy in an age of ever-more sophisticated — and intrusive — technology. And it involves Amazon's bestselling holiday product, the Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled speaker that has sold millions.

The gist, according to court records: Police accused James A. Bates of killing his friend Victor Collins, who was found dead in Bates' backyard hot tub in 2015.

While searching Bates' home, detectives discovered he owned an Amazon Echo. It's a "smart speaker" with a personal assistant called Alexa that interprets voice commands to, say, play a song, search for something online or even buy something from amazon.com.

Authorities served Amazon with a search warrant demanding that the Seattle company release any voice recordings or data saved from Bates' device. The company has not complied, records show. Bates has pleaded not guilty to a charge of first-degree murder and is scheduled to go on trial in 2017.

In a statement, Amazon said it "objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course."

This complicated case, first reported by the Information, a tech news website, has legal and technological experts assessing how expectations of privacy shift as technology becomes more embedded in our everyday lives.

"There's always going to be this push and pull between convenience and privacy," said St. Petersburg defense attorney Marc Pelletier. "And I think the more privacy that people give up, the less the court is going to recognize an expectation of privacy as being reasonable."

Amazon's Echo device is composed of speakers, microphones and a small computer. It's constantly listening to detect a "wake word" — the default command is "Alexa" — according to the company's website. Upon hearing the prompt, the device starts recording the user.

The company said the Echo is not constantly recording its users, and they have the option of deleting those recordings later.

The Echo is a 9-inch tall cylinder that sells for $179. The same technology is used in smaller devices like the Amazon Tap ($129) and the Echo Dot ($49.)

Alexa's technology is similar to Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant app used on Apple devices like iPhones. Microsoft's assistant is Cortana. Google's version is called Google Assistant and can be used on Android devices and its own smart speaker, Google Home.

The search warrant doesn't specify what authorities believe could be in the data recorded by Bates' Echo, other than it contains "evidence related to the case under investigation."

If Amazon continues to ignore the search warrant, prosecutors could take the online retail giant to court to force it to comply. But Clearwater defense attorney Denis deVlaming believes authorities will have a hard time arguing their case.

"It's fishing. They want to find out and take a look at what might be there that might help their case," he said. "They're going to have to come up with a specific reason of what they think is going to be found in there."

He compared it to a case in which one of his clients received a subpoena to give police access to a Facebook account. In a motion objecting to that subpoena, deVlaming argued it may contain confidential information, such as communications, that falls within attorney-client privilege or is protected under medical confidentiality laws.

He submitted that motion to the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as a template for others to use. He believes such subpoenas will become more and more common.

"All these things they can gather information from is the wave of the future," he said.

But deVlaming said that consumers must also be cautious in what kind of technology they buy, how they use it and how much of their information they should share online. He often advises clients to delete their social media accounts.

That onus becomes much greater when it comes to a device like the Echo, Pelletier said. To him, the issues in the Arkansas case are different from the issues raised this year when Apple denied the FBI's requests to unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre. In that case, Pelletier said, the government was asking Apple to breach its own security protocol to obtain data specific to one phone.

"Here, you've got all the data just flowing out of your house," he said, because the data collected by the Echo isn't just stored in the device itself, but is also stored in the cloud on Amazon's servers. That could erode the expectation of privacy, he said.

The Arkansas case is reminiscent of a Tampa case last year when police cited Justin Murdock, then 30, for possession of marijuana. But police also got a search warrant to look for evidence of drug sales in Murdock's computer tablet. Instead, police said they found child pornography and ended up arresting Murdock on 100 counts of possession of child porn.

Murdock's attorney, Brett Szematowicz, filed a motion challenging the search of the tablet. The judge ruled against it because Murdock denied the tablet was his when he was arrested. Therefore, in this case, he had no expectation of privacy for the device.

"If a judge had ruled he had expectation of privacy," Szematowicz said, "no search would be valid based on the way police handled it."

As the technology behind devices like the Echo is refined, such devices will likely grow more sophisticated at voice recognition and complex commands, said Lawrence Hall, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida.

But such devices, which are always listening for a command word, could make consumers even more vulnerable. Hall recommended users change the default recording prompt and look into safeguards for commands for shopping or financial transactions.

Or they could keep in mind what deVlaming tells his clients:

"What you put in the cloud can come down and rain on you."

Contact Kathryn Varn at (727) 445-4157 or kvarn@tampabay.com. Follow @kathrynvarn.