Amazon Employees May Listen To Recordings Captured By Your Echo
Echo Dot devices are pictured at Amazon Headquarters on September 20, 2018 in Seattle Washington.
A team at Amazon that includes both full-time employees and contractors listens to people's audio snippets recorded by devices with the company's Alexa assistant installed, according toSeven people, described as having worked in Amazon's voice review program, told Bloomberg that they sometimes listen to as many as 1,000 recordings per shift, and that the recordings are associated with the customer's first name, their device's serial number, and an account number.
In an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News, an Amazon spokesperson wrote that"an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings" is annotated, and reviewing the audio"helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone."
Additionally,"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," according to the spokesperson. Apple and Google, which make two other popular voice-enabled assistants, also employ humans who review audio commands spoken to their devices; both companies say that they anonymize the recordings and don't associate them with customers' accounts. Apple's
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