We have two stories this week: first, the surprising history "elevator music." Turns out, Muzak was a real company. And then we reveal how much Amazon's Alexa and other smart speakers are really listening — and remembering what we do and say.
Produced by Dan Bobkoff, Amy Pedulla, Jennifer Sigl, and Sarah Wyman, and Carolyn McCulley and Dallas Taylor at Twenty Thousand Hertz, with help from Sam Schneble.
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DB: From Business Insider and Stitcher this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't.
I'm Dan Bobkoff.
Today: Two stories about listening. First, the history of elevator music — known to some as Muzak. But not so much anymore. Why?
And later, we all know smart speakers like Amazon Echo are listening, but you might not know what these companies are doing with your voice. I'll speak with Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler.
Stay with us.
ACT I
DB: Elevator music, hold music, whatever you call it, you've probably heard it referred to at some point as Muzak, but what you might not know is that Muzak was an actual company. Our first story today comes from the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, which is a show all about sound.
DALLAS TAYLOR: You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor.
What came to be called "elevator music" is almost never heard in elevators today. So how did it earn the name "elevator music"? This is the story of Muzak—a company that changed the way public spaces sound.
JOSEPH LANZA: I like the term "Elevator Music." I don't think there's anything inherently pejorative about it, because it's music that's supposed to elevate people's moods.
DT: That's Joseph Lanza. He is the author of the book, "Elevator Music." His book explores the history of the Muzak company and the genre of music it promoted—called Easy Listening. You're hearing one of those tracks right now. It's from one of their "Stimulus Progression" albums. ...but, I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to Joseph.
JL: It was a musical currency that started in the '40s and but it went on through the '50s. And then when music changed a bit – when you had more electric guitars and drums—then Easy Listening adapted to it, as well.
DT: One of the most iconic tracks is the "Theme from a Summer Place." The music was written by Max Steiner, and the most famous recording of it was from Percy Faith. It's exactly what you probably think of when you think of Muzak.
JL: Usually it was strings. A lot of strings were supplying the top melody, the vocal melody. I don't think many people really disliked it as much as people want to believe today. It was just very sweet, pretty music and you would often hear it in actual pop songs.
DT: But this sweet, pretty music actually had a grim origin—the Muzak company got its start on the battlefield.
Major General George Squier served as the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer during World War I. That wartime work later on led him to develop a way to transmit music across electrical wires. So General Squier founded a company to send businesses and residences music via a wired system. It was a great idea. But—like many business owners discover the hard way—it rolled out a bit too late. When Squier was ready to launch his company in the mid '30s, wireless radio was already dominating the market. So, he had to pivot.
His new business plan was to deliver background music to restaurants, stores, office buildings and yes, to elevators. The idea was that this music would calm the nerves of jittery riders in modern high-rise elevators.
JL: When the electronic elevator first came about, some people were afraid to enter it. Especially in the New York area where you had these skyscrapers coming up in the '30s. So, they called it elevator music—maybe because they could hear it more, because they were in this confined space. So, from the ceiling you would probably hear this melody. But those melodies were in hotel lobbies, restaurants, supermarkets, doctor's offices, all sorts of places.
DT: The music that seems so bland to us now was the stuff of the future in the 1920s. In fact, General Squier named the new company Muzak—as a hat tip to the innovative film company he admired, Kodak.
JL: One of the inspirations for that was a novel by Edward Bellamy called Looking Backward. It was a science fiction vision of a wonderful future where technology does wonderful things. And one of the features was every room will be fashioned with a little dial where you can just turn on music of various moods. So, that's what got it going. What we know as elevator music today—which is primarily these instrumental versions of pop tunes—that science really started coming about more in the '40s.
NEWSREEL: America goes to war.
DT: Muzak was an idea borne out of World War 1. But the company saw a new opportunity during the manufacturing boom of World War II. Muzak wanted to use music to motivate workers.
JL: There was a guy who was a Muzak programmer who was also a very famous big band musician named Ben Selvin. He gave a paper to the Acoustical Society of America, and he was talking about what the ideal industry and workplace music would be. And that's where he said that instrumental only would be the best thing and not overly arranged.
DT: Ben not only suggested the type of music to be played, but he also suggested how this music should be programmed throughout the day. Muzak called it Stimulus Progression, a concept they patented. The music you're hearing right now is one of those tracks. Stimulus Progression was a block of instrumental background music that gradually increased in pace and gave workers a sense of forward movement. Muzak claimed that when workers listened to the music, they got more work done. This block of music was then followed by a period of silence. Company-funded research showed that alternating music with silence reduced listener fatigue. And that, they claimed, made the "stimulus" part of Stimulus Progression more effective.
JL: It was the only company at the time, I believe, that was involved in the commercial world that was really thinking about ecology of music. In 1967, they had a scientific board of advisors and there was this doctor who put forward this paper called The Ecologic of Muzak saying that there's certain types of music that are more beneficial for the workaday world.
So, there's public music and there's private music, and I think Muzak was trying to fill that void of what public music would sound like.
Unfortunately, I think in public spaces today, people don't take those concerns into account.
DT: The founder of Muzak was inspired by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy was a 19th century author and visionary who dreamed of how we would use music in the year 2000. He also wasn't far off from modern debit cards and online shopping, too. And oddly, those things are entwined more than ever in a post-Muzak world. More on that in a moment.
The Sound of Muzak—it was the easy-listening sound of mid-20th century America. During the lunar launch of Apollo 11, the astronauts listened to Muzak to calm themselves. President Kennedy even played Muzak on Air Force One and in the White House. Muzak was everywhere then. As a Muzak slogan claimed: "Muzak fills the deadly silences."
JULIAN TREASURE: If it's intelligent and appropriately done, music can be massively powerful, and it can have very, very strong positive effects on people. If, on the other hand, we treat it like a veneer, and mindlessly cover the world with it, I think that's a problem.
DT: That's Julian Treasure, founder of The Sound Agency, and an international expert on communication and sound.
JT: It's all about making the world sound better. I care about that because I listen all the time. And I try not to spend too much of my time going around being grumpy, but there's a lot of bad sound around us, which is just the kind of by-product of stuff happening. You know, it's like the exhaust gas of living.
We've become an immensely ocular culture. Everything is designed for the eyes [tech SFX montage]. And the way it sounds is way down the list, if it exists at all.
DT: That's the impact of Muzak's legacy on us today. Muzak gave us a lot more than just the genre of Easy Listening. Muzak introduced the idea that music was to occupy and influence public spaces.
JT: There's a lot of frankly spurious research which purports to show that we all love music, everywhere. We don't. There are many people who find it deeply offensive or upsetting. And music in public places can be, and often is, extremely inappropriate. Music is quite a dense sound, so we identify certain aspects of sounds. There's the pitch, or tone, or the melodies or harmonies of music, if it is music. There's the pace, the tempo, or meter, or rhythm, or whatever else a sound might have. There's the density, which is how much attention is this sound calling for? Some sounds are very sparse, that you don't pay much attention to them, like the background noise of traffic, anything that's constant or doesn't change much. On the other had bebop jazz, or a ringing telephone, or a baby crying, are very dense sounds, indeed, and they call a lot of attention. Then you've got the variability of the sound. How much does it change? And the intensity of the sound—how loud is it? We need to pay attention to all these things.
Then there may be brands that can express themselves very powerfully through a musical environment. In retail, people always ask me about Hollister or Abercrombie and Fitch, and I think it's entirely appropriate what they do. They use fragrance, they use design, visual design, texture, touch, feel as well, and they use sound, particular musical programming to filter the people who go in there. I don't particularly enjoy that environment. I'm not supposed to. I'm not their target audience. So my deal with them is, I don't go in. My children go in, choose the clothes, I dive in at the last minute, pay and get out of there. That's how it's supposed to be. They don't want their store to be full of people of my age.
DB: After the break, more Muzak.
ACT II
DB: We're back. Here's Dallas Taylor again.
DT: When stuff can be delivered directly to your door, retailers and restaurants today have to create a curated experience to survive. They have to create a space where discovery and connection are the powerful draws to make you leave your couch. And how a space sounds is a big part of that experience.
JT: When you're designing an office or a restaurant or anything like that, you have to balance privacy against noise. I don't want to hear what somebody across the office is saying on the phone, because, in the office I'm trying to concentrate. At dinner I want some privacy for my conversation, so if I can hear them they can hear me and that's kind of intimidating and uncomfortable. You need some background noise in a restaurant in order to mask other peoples' conversations. We can manipulate sound in amazing ways, now, with DSP, digital signal processing, to cloud or blur conversations from other tables, so that you can't understand what people are saying, by feeding back in, slightly out of phase, the signal that's coming from them, and just distorting it enough, whilst you can hear yourself absolutely clearly.
DT: Unlike the easy listening of Muzak's heyday, music in public spaces today is often faster and louder. Restaurant reviewers who measure and list noise in their reviews are reporting levels above 70 and even 80 decibels Those levels can cause hearing loss over time. Things like open kitchen floor plans, hard surfaces, and uptempo music all contribute to these noise levels.
JT: There's a phenomenon called entrainment, where if you're surrounded by fast-paced sound, you tend to move faster, and do things faster. You can get more stressed, as well, by the way. Which, again, makes it surprising to us that so many stores play jolly pop music fast-paced. Because all they're doing is speeding people up. And retailers know that dwell time, the amount of time we stay in the store, is directly related to sales and how much we spend. In other words, if they speed us up, we spend less money. They lose. Yet, so many stores are doing exactly that.
If you're a fast food restaurant, I totally get it. The research shows that if we play fast-paced music and people are dining, they chew faster, they finish faster, they leave faster. Well, if you're a fine dining establishment, that's insane. If you're a burger bar and you want tables to turn over every 20 minutes or something, it makes all the sense in the world to do that to people.
DT: So, right about now you might notice your heart rate has increased. Maybe you're feeling a little stressed or jittery or anxious. We chose the last track of music for that specific reason. We've also been slowly speeding it up. So, memorize this feeling because it's happening to you ALL THE TIME and you don't even know it.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the sound in stores are thoughtfully designed to get you to buy stuff. While the sound in fast food restaurants are designed to get you in and out quickly. But there's also another place where sound and music might be influencing you. And that's at work.
JT: I talk about the four effects of sound on human beings: physiological, the effect on our body. Psychological, the effect on our feelings. Cognitive, the effect on our ability to process, where that kind of office environment can cut our productivity down to a third of its potential. And finally, behavioral, the effect on our behavior, which is really significant.
I'm not saying all silent. You know, going to see a football match in a silent stadium would be a very spooky experience. On the other hand, we know that in a library, the rule is, shh, no talking, and we need to have more spaces like that, where people can actually work in peace.
There have been plenty of studies of noise in offices to show that noise creates a release of cortisol and noradrenaline—our fight or flight hormones, makes people more stressed. It increases blood pressure. That's clear, and that's been shown many, many times in studies. And, of course, chronic exposure to noise and it doesn't have to be that loud, we're talking about anything over about 65 decibels, chronic exposure to that kind of level of noise increases your risk of heart attack and stroke because of this increase in blood pressure and stress levels over a long period of time. That's clearly been indicated by a lot of research now, and unfortunately many people are working in environments where it is exactly that loud.
DT: Maybe Muzak was onto something when it created elevator music. Or, maybe it just contributed to how noisy our world is now. Either way, we know that Muzak's intent was to create an appealing "soundscape" for the ears - kinda like what a beautiful "landscape" does for the eyes. If nothing else, it taught us that sound has an enormous physical and emotional impact on all of us… and if used consciously, you can even affect your mood pretty drastically. It can help you study, give you energy, wake you up, or just make you happy. AND, you can use it as much (or as little) as you want.
DB: That was Dallas Taylor from the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz.
After the break, Alexa, Google, and Siri are listening…. REALLY listening.
Stay with us.
ACT III
DB: We're back.
I got my first Amazon Alexa device when Business Insider launched the flash briefing, 10 Things in Tech — you can listen each weekday morning. And since then I've used it to turn on the lights, and get the news. And whenever I'd talk to it, I just kind of assumed it took my voice and did some kind of high tech machine processing and that was that… my voice going off into the ether.
What I didn't realize until recently is that Amazon actually records and stores what I say every single time I say Alexa. If you have one of these, you can actually find a spot deep in your settings where you can hear all of these recordings. And Bloomberg reported recently that sometimes, there are real people who listen to these recordings. They reportedly can figure out where you live, and these workers sometimes share funny or personal recordings among themselves. Which means there might be some people in an office somewhere who hear a lot of me saying this…
DB: Alexa, tell me a pun…
Anyway, Geoffrey Fowler has been thinking a lot about these devices and privacy lately. He's the technology columnist for the Washington Post and he joins me now. Welcome.
GEOFFREY FOWLER: Glad to be here.
DB: So, what was your first Alexa device?
GF: I had one of the very first ones. I've been in the gadget reviewing game for a number of years, and when Amazon first introduced the Echo speaker, it was a special thing you could only get if you got on a special lottery that Amazon was running. So, I actually ended up buying it through eBay from somebody who had gotten it, and thought it was a piece of junk, and wanted to resell it, because Amazon wouldn't send me one to review as a gadget reviewer, which is pretty unusual in the gadget world.
DB: So, what were your expectations for this Amazon Alexa future?
GF: I mean, the way that Amazon had been pitching this was that it was kind of a genie in a bottle, right. It was the thing that could answer whatever query you had, and help you run your home, and kind of have a computer at your side at all times. And, if I recall, in those early days, it was pretty terrible at those things. My first review of the Amazon Echo was not really a very good one. I found that it didn't really understand my voice very well, and it couldn't really answer many questions.
DB: Were you worried at all about the implications at that point?
GF: In those days, we weren't thinking as much about this issue that is forefront in our minds now, which is what data is being collected about me by a giant corporation that might use it against me or might even lose it?
DB: So, until maybe, I don't know, six months ago or a year ago, I had always assumed that, whether it's Siri or Alexa, whatever I said into it just sort of got processed, and then it gave me the information, and that nothing was saved that. I didn't think it was actually recording my voice. I thought maybe it was doing some high tech processing of my words and then serving information. So what is actually happening?
GF: Yeah. I think you're not alone. I think most of the owners of Alexa devices and other smart speakers or assistant devices do not realize that the makers of these devices are keeping the recordings of everything that they hear after you say the wake word. In the case of Amazon, it's Alexa. And sometimes they're even keeping recordings of things that you say even when you didn't say the wake word. And they want to store and hold on to these recordings into perpetuity.
I knew what was going on and it was a pet peeve of mine. And whenever I write about this topic, I always say, 'And they keep these recordings,' but I decided, 'You know what? I really want to understand what this means in my life,' so I went on this, I think I called it a unwelcome walk down memory lane, where I opened up my collection of Alexa recordings and spent many hours just digging through the thousands, and thousands, and thousands of them that have been collected by Amazon since I first got that Echo.
DB: So, what did you find? What are some of the highlights and lowlights from the past four years of you talking to an object in your house?
GF: Well, some of it is what you would expect: a lot of me requesting timers to make the spaghetti or to find out the answers to random trivia. I remember I learned that I asked, "How tall is Barron Trump?" And what I realized is Amazon has this very complete picture of my voice, it's got so many recordings of it that they know it from all these different sides and directions and you know they could probably re-create it but it's kind of a weird phenomenon, even in the cases where I was just asking about something in the news or just making dinner.
It's weird to have that recorded and to stay into perpetuity. We don't think about our voices or those casual conversations inside the home as living on in that way. Then there were things that friends and family had said as well that were in there. I discovered I had some house guests who stayed at my place a couple of years ago, and while I was gone they asked lot of very interesting things.
DB: What did they ask?
GF: They asked Alexa to fart a lot. They asked Alexa to make cat noises. They asked Alexa whether... One person asked whether her husband really loved her. They were having all sorts of fun with it, and they had no idea that this is all going to be recorded, and that some day I would come to them and say, "Hey, guess what I just heard you saying on my microphone in my home?"
You think you know people, but then you really get to know them when you see what they say to Alexa when they think no one's listening. And then there were dozens and dozens of recordings of things that nobody ever intended to wake up Alexa and try to get her to interact with us about.
And then there were things that were just people were having conversations, and it just randomly decided to start recording. A family member was discussing medication, and it recorded that. Another friend was sitting on my couch, on the phone, working on a business deal that she was closing, and it started recording that as well.
DB: Was there anything in your personal recordings that you really wish that Jeff Bezos couldn't hear?
GF: That's a tough question to answer. All of it? I mean, my question is why do they need these recordings at all? This is the intimate conversations of my home. Why should that be recorded into perpetuity? That's just creepy.
I think hearing your own voice puts it in a place, and a time, and a context; you can hear what music was playing around you, you can hear whether you were in a good mood or in a bad mood. And it sort of makes it come alive again for a moment, which is different than words typed into a search box. And then also I found dozens of recordings that no one ever intended to put into a microphone or search box, they just picked up on their own, and that's really, really creepy.
DB: Okay. So, let's get into some of these privacy issues, because you write in your reporting that the word eavesdropping is pretty contentious for Amazon, that they've actually battled against some customers who are, shall we say, confused about who is listening when they speak to Alexa. Do you consider this eavesdropping?
GF: I do consider it eavesdropping, and so do lawmakers in California who are currently considering a bill called the Anti-Eavesdropping Law that would require Amazon and other companies that make these voice assistants to get our explicit opt-in permission before they keep these recordings.
In many states, including California and others, it's already the law that you have to have someone's permission before you record them. So, I've already broken that law, I guess, with lots of friends in my home who did not realize that their voices were going to be not only send off to a server to be translated, but also then kept and recorded in a way that Amazon and I could go back and listen to over time. So, there are already laws that would call doing that eavesdropping. So, I think we're just, at the moment, out of sync with that.
DB: Who's responsible there, you or Amazon?
GF: That's a good question. I think Amazon needs to design a system, needs to design a product, that wouldn't put us in that situation. I mean, I suppose if somebody tried to take it to court, they could argue, 'well, if you see the speaker there, or you see the light turn on on it to activate the recording, that that was sufficient notice that you're being recorded,' but in practice that's just not the way it works. Very few people want to have a home where recordings of things, even the things that they were intentionally saying to this, are kept into perpetuity.
DB: Obviously, Amazon is not the only voice assistant company out there: we have Apple, we have Google, we have others. So, what are some of the privacy concerns generally? What are you seeing from other companies?
GF: Well, we're seeing some different approaches to how they, they by default, collect the recordings of our voices, as well as all sorts of other data about our homes. And the great comparison here, and one of the surprises to me in my reporting, is Google. So, Google is usually sort of at the bottom of the list when we talk about privacy practices, but it turns out last year at some point, pretty quietly, Google changed its defaults for Google Assistant and those Google Home devices. And not only does it give you the option to say, 'Hey, stop keeping these recordings,' but it also no longer turns that on by default, which is to say if you were to go and buy a new Google Home device today and set up in your home, by default, it's not keeping recordings of everything you say.
So, here we have a situation where Google is actually sort of leading the best privacy practice when it comes to this sort of stuff, and Amazon is really falling far behind.
DB: So, when you asked Amazon about why they keep the recordings, their main response boils down to it helps them improve the product, right? But, Google is not storing it, at least not by default. So, does Alexa work better than Google Assistant?
GF: As a gadget reviewer, I would say Alexa does not work better than Google Assistant. In fact, Google's artificial intelligence technology is in many ways superior. Now this, there could be many reasons for this, it could be that Google has already collected so much data about human voices that it just doesn't need it anymore or that Amazon is just still trying to collect as much data just because it can, and nobody's really noticing, and there aren't any laws to stop it.
DB: So, you've said that you feel this is very close to bugging. Is there something that distinguishes it maybe in the fine print from actually bugging people? What's the loophole?
GF: A couple of things; one, they do have a button on the top of these speaker devices which you can press, which physically cuts off the microphone so it could not record, but pressing that button also sort of defeats the purpose of the device. So, I don't know many people who press that button very often. I usually just press it when I'm doing radio interviews about this stuff, and I don't want it to go off while I'm talking about Alexa.
DB: What do you think people would say if the voice coming out of Alexa just said to them, 'Hey do you mind if I store for everything you said to me in perpetuity?'
GF: You'd say, 'Absolutely not,' but it raises a really good point that we're not yet equipped with the right metaphor to understand what these smart home devices really are. And there was a Stanford professor, a professor of A.I and psychology, who I was talking to about this, this problem, and he had a really interesting way of framing it, and he said, 'If you think back to, let's say, the era of Downton Abbey in England. If you were people of a certain level of wealth, you could hire all these helpers in your home, right, these servants. And they would use their human intelligence, and their hands, and their labor to make sure that your house ran smoothly and that your breakfast was always available exactly when you might want it. But if you lived in Downton Abbey you knew to be really kind of careful about what you said in front of some of these human servants and helpers, right, because they were always listening and they would be picking up on all sorts of cues about what was going on in your life, some of which you might not want spread around.'
We're not nearly that careful about what we say and do in front of these electronic devices that also have ears and are keeping track of stuff and are doing arguably an even better job. So, maybe we need to start actually thinking of these things kind of like humans in our home who might collect information and disclose it to others that we in a way we might not want.
DB: Yes. After you went through all of your Alexa recordings, you started to audit all the smart things in your house. What did you find?
GF: I found a sort of a level of detail about the activity in my home that truly would require a spy to be running to be able to get this. For example, I have a Nest thermostat, lots of people do, it was one of the first connected devices. The Nest thermostat is now owned by Google. And the thermostat reports back to Google in 15 minute increments not only data about the temperature of my home, and the relative humidity, and when I adjust the temperature, but also it lets Google now every time somebody passes in front of the thermostat. There is a presence sensor in it. And in my house, where it happens to be located, that means Google knows every time I get up in the middle of the night to go use the restroom, or to get a snack, or you name it. They know every time someone's at home.
DB: Wow. So, you could also imagine a court that is subpoenaing your recordings from your Google Assistant or your Alexa, and then also your thermostat, it could be your alibi where it says that you were home or you were not home. It just seems... I don't know. Is this almost like the Stasi?
GEF: That's exactly the image that came to my mind. And I think we really need to kind of step back here for a moment, because the idea that these tech companies are presenting to us is that, 'Well, this is the future, and so just going to have to decide either are you going to be picky about your privacy and not put these things in your homes, or you put these things in your home and you have to let us collect all this data into perpetuity.' And I think that's really a false choice. We don't have to give up our privacy to benefit from the potential of a smart home or even artificial intelligence to run our homes more intelligently and more environmentally friendly and save energy.
DB: So, for those who don't want to give up living in the future, but are worried about their privacy, what are some simple things they can do?
GF: Well, there are some choices that we can make as consumers based on how we know these companies deal with data today. So, if you care about your voice and these recordings going on in your home, definitely don't choose an Alexa speaker to have in your house. Google's policies on this are a bit better. Google also, by default, is not keeping a record of other smart home activity from other devices in the way that Alexa does.
When it comes to the smart home, when it comes to artificial intelligence, it doesn't have the same reputation. Everybody likes to joke about how Siri isn't very smart, but Apple has made some design choices in its products that essentially make it store and collect less data about what's going on in our homes.
And I think that is ultimately the best choice to make right now. We're not exactly certain where this data is going to go or how it might be used against us, let's just not collect it in the first place.
DB: And then, I guess, I also wonder know where is regulation, where is the government? Is there a role for them here? I mean, now we just had that op-ed the other day from Chris Hughes saying 'it's time to break up Facebook.' There is potential fines for Facebook for years. What do you think is sort of the right role for some sort of overseer?
GF: Yeah. I think there's a ton of conversation happening now about privacy. I wish some of it would move out of conversation and stump speeches and into action. I'm not certain that I see many signals that that's really going to happen, but we do see, like the laws we talked about in California and Illinois that are being considered about recording, about whether these artificial intelligence devices can automatically record our voices. I think one thing that I would like to see considered more in all of this is more limits and constraints around the amount of data that these companies can be collecting in the first place. Where the tech companies always go and what they want with the regulations is they say, 'Oh, as long as we give people controls over it, so they can delete it, or move it out, or whatnot, then everything's okay.'
DB: It sounds like we should be wary of these smart devices. What are some of the top things we should consider doing about them in our own lives?
GF: Well, you can definitely ask more questions about what data they're keeping, inspect these pages they've got up about privacy. And if they won't answer the question in a clear way, then that's a signal that you shouldn't trust them. And, again, I just... we don't have to accept it, there is this false choice that we're being given by Silicon Valley, and it's just bullshit.
If you want to listen to the recordings that Alexa has been making of your home, you can go to Amazon.com/Alexaprivacy and then log into your Amazon account. And then once you're there, you'll find a link that lets you go through and see this entire history and archive. And also delete some of the recordings that are there. You can't tell Amazon to stop recording you in the future, which is really unfortunate. That's something they really ought to do, but you can at least delete the recordings that it's already made of you.
DB: All right. Well, Geoffrey Fowler, technology columnist for The Washington Post, based in San Francisco, thanks so much.
GF: You bet.
CREDITS
DF: Today's story on Muzak was produced by the podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz. If you liked this episode, you'll definitely like their show. Twenty Thousand Hertz is a really well-produced podcast that tells the stories about the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.
I've really been enjoying it and I think you will too, so subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Twenty Thousand Hertz, which is all spelled out, no numbers. You can find details in the show notes as well.
The episode was written and produced by Carolyn McCulley and Dallas Taylor with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited, sound designed and mixed by Jai Burger. Special thanks to Joseph Lanza, the author of Elevator Music and Julian Treasure, chairman of the sound agency.
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound.
We always like hearing what you think of our show and love getting all of your story ideas. Get in touch. You can email us at householdname@insider.com. You can also follow me on twitter at @danbobkoff or join our Facebook group just search Household Name podcast. And don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Especially, if you, you know, like what you hear.
Household Name is produced by Amy Pedulla, Jennifer Sigl, Sarah Wyman and me, Dan Bobkoff.
Our editor is Gianna Palmer.
Sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore.
The executive producers are Chris Bannon and me.
Household Name is a production of