Every time you give a voice command to Alexa, it is possible that an employee at Amazon is reviewing what you said in an effort to improve Alexa's comprehension of human speech. According to a report in Bloomberg, Amazon employs thousands of people all around the world to transcribe and annotate the commands that users give to their Echo smart speakers. The employees then feed that information back into Alexa's software so that it is able to respond faster and more accurately to those commands in the future.
The employees do not have access to the personal information of the users who have been recorded, but they do know the serial number of the users' devices and the Amazon account number associated it with it.
Amazon says they have enacted safeguards to ensure that their employees do not abuse the data they have access to.
“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system," Amazon said in a statement to Bloomberg. "Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality, and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”
If you are not comfortable with Amazon being able to use your voice to improve Alexa, you can opt-out by checking the privacy settings on the Alexa app and clicking on “Manage how your data improves Alexa.” On that page, you can turn off the options to allow Amazon to use your recordings or messages to help develop new features.
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