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Artificial intelligence: Some can hardly wait for the future, others are already demonizing it. Some use Apple's Siri, others use Microsoft's Cortana or Google's solution. However, Amazon's Alexa is also very popular among many fans. It is smart, clever and useful - but data protection should not be Alexa's top priority.
According to a new Bloomberg report, Amazon has a department that listens to Alexa users' private conversations and records them in writing. According to the report, Alexa is supposed to record conversations in the home and send them to Amazon employees in the USA, Costa Rica, India and Romania for analysis. The task of these employees is to improve Alexa. By listening to and writing down these conversations, the virtual assistant's voice recognition is supposed to become significantly better. In doing so, private conversations would inevitably be recorded - according to the news channel.
The tricky part: Affected users are unaware of this. Amazon's Alexa terms of use also contain no indication that said recordings are subsequently listened to and documented by real employees. It simply states: "For example, we use your commands to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems" – whether the analysis is performed by humans or machines, and that entire conversations are included, is not specified.
Recording without activation command
Amazon itself has partially admitted to this practice in the past. According to the online retailer, only a small fraction of such data is further processed – however, employees do not have access to personal customer data. The recordings therefore do not allow the identification of individuals or accounts. However, Bloomberg has obtained other information. According to the report, these packets contain the first name of the respective user and the account and serial number of the individual device. Employees are said to process around 1,000 such recordings daily. Around 10 percent of these data packets contain recordings without the affected users having issued the activation command for Alexa. According to Bloomberg's source, the phrase "Alexa, is anyone else listening?" is said to be particularly popular. A current statement from Amazon is still pending. It remains to be seen whether and how the company will respond to this allegation.
How to deactivate the Alexa development feature
The topic is currently being hotly debated in various forums – some Alexa fans aren't bothered by Bloomberg's latest report. Others, however, want to prevent this from happening. Of course, the function for further developing Alexa can be deactivated – we'll show you how. If you really want to be on the safe side, you can turn off the feature in the Alexa app for iOS and Android. To do this, go to the settings, accessible via the menu icon, select "Alexa Account" and then "Alexa Privacy". Now the option to improve Alexa can be activated or deactivated as desired. The whole process can also be controlled via Amazon's official website. To do this, the user must log in to their Amazon account and navigate to "My Account". Then call up the "My Content and Devices" tab. This opens a subpage that allows you to select the "Alexa Privacy" section. Here, the user can also select the respective setting for improving Alexa.
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