While we know that there are advantages of using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant-enabled speakers, there are disadvantages as well. In recent weeks, we have heard privacy issues about every smart speaker out there. It all started with Amazon’s Alexa-enabled speakers and then it continued with Google Home and Apple HomePod devices.
In Amazon’s case, it was revealed that Amazon contractors are manually checking or listening to your recordings on Alexa. For instance, whenever you talk to your Echo devices, a recording is made and saved on Amazon’s servers. Later, someone from Amazon’s contractors will read those recordings. Amazon revealed that it is done so that speech recognition on its Assistant can be improved.
However, this was a big privacy concern and Amazon has reacted to this as well. The company had earlier said that you can delete your Alexa recordings from its servers. While this was a good idea, it was also a task that most users would not be able to perform.
Now, a new announcement has been made of an option added to Echo speakers. Amazon says that you can now opt-out of getting your Alexa recordings reviewed manually. This means your recordings will remain private to you and Amazon’s contractors will not listen to them.
This comes after Google and Apple paused their manual review procedure. However, that does not mean the reviewing will be stopped. On the other hand, Amazon makes it clear that reviewing will be stopped if you opt-out.
Here is Amazon spokesperson’s statement on this report:
We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures. For Alexa, we already offer customers the ability to opt-out of having their voice recordings used to help develop new Alexa features. The voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests. We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear.