There's a simple way to make sure Amazon workers can't listen to what you say to Alexa - here's how to do it
- Recordings from your Amazon Alexa-enabled smart speaker can be sent to a team at Amazon to improve Alexa's functionality.
- But it's possible to prevent your recordings from being sent to Amazon workers.
- With that said, there's still a chance your recordings could be used for analysis, Alexa improvements, and new feature developments.
- Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.
Thousands of Amazon employees and contractors can listen to what you say to Alexa via Alexa-enabled smart devices, like Amazon's own Echo smart speaker, according to a report from Bloomberg on Wednesday.
Indeed, your recording can be "transcribed, annotated, and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands," Bloomberg reported.
Amazon's teams even have chat rooms where they can get help with tricky transcriptions, or share amusing snippets, according to Bloomberg.
But there is a way to stop Amazon from reviewing your recordings. In the Amazon Alexa app on your smartphone, follow these steps:
1. Tap the three horizontal lines on the top left.
2. Tap settings.
3. Tap Alexa account.
4. Tap Alexa Privacy.
5. Tap "Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa."
6. Tap the switch button to the off position next to "Help Develop New Features."
7. Tap the switch button to the off position under "Use Messages To Improve Transcriptions."
Turning off the feature might prevent new features from working properly, according to the Alexa app. But turning it off will also prevent your recordings from being sent to Amazon to be analyzed - however, Amazon says "people who opt out of that program might still have their recordings analyzed by hand over the regular course of the review process," Bloomberg noted.
Business Insider has asked Amazon for clarification on what "analyzed by hand" specifically means, but the company did not immediately respond.
While Amazon says it only uses snippets of voice recordings to develop new features, the fact that things you say can be analysed by a person could be unnerving for many users, perhaps even more so than if their speech was being analyzed by a computer.
There's also the possibility that things users never meant for Alexa to hear can be picked up, too: Alexa-enabled smart devices can pick up "false positives," where the speaker thinks it heard the "Alexa" wake-up command when a user didn't mean to summon it.
On top of that, Bloomberg reported that snippets of things said to Alexa are accompanied by a user's first name and account number, as well as the smart speaker's serial number.