Prevent Amazon From Eavesdropping on Your Conversations With Alexa
Fun fact: snippets of your conversations with Alexa can be heard and read by thousands of Amazon employees. According to recent reports , Amazon has an international team of employees working to help Alexa better understand your multiple teams and develop new ways for AI to interact with users. This requires them to listen to snippets of what your Echo speakers and other Alexa devices are recording. Sounds eerily familiar .
Not only are real people listening to you, talking to (and around) Alexa, but the conversations they listen to are transcribed and annotated by Amazon staff. These transcriptions are then used to “train” the AI Alexa to recognize more commands.
If it sketched you, we understand. Moreover, what you say is just a kind of link to your account, as Bloomberg describes:
“A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that posts submitted to Alexa reviewers do not contain the user’s full name and address, but are linked to an account number, as well as a username and device serial number.”
While you can never stop Amazon employees from eavesdropping on everything you say to your Alexa, you can at least turn off any features that make it easier. For instance:
- Open the Alexa mobile app
- Click the menu button in the upper left corner of the screen.
- Go to Alexa Account> Alexa Privacy> Manage Alexa Data Enhancement.
- Disable Help for New Features and Use Messages to Improve Transcription for all profiles in your account.
Bloomberg notes that the Amazon team can still analyze your Alexa records “manually,” but that at least excludes you from some aspects of Amazon’s voice research. The only real solution at this point is to ditch your Amazon devices entirely, but we hope that changing these privacy settings will help keep unnecessary third parties out of your business a little.