Amazon is no longer listening: users of Amazon's digital assistant can now rule out that their voice recordings are intercepted and analyzed by Amazon employees. In the Alexa settings a corresponding option has been integrated.
In April it had become known that the voice commands of Alexa are recorded and that Amazon employees evaluate them. This should improve the software. However, this was not always done anonymously: in some cases, the records were linked to data on the Amazon user account.
Amazon now offers its customers the ability to prevent manual analysis of voice recordings, reports the US business news agency Bloomberg, The option for this can be found in the settings in the Alexa app. In addition, this goes through the Alexa account in the browser. Amazon introduced some time ago the possibility to delete individual voice commands or those of a whole day.
Apple and Google are also listening
In addition to Amazon, Google and Apple have also recorded the recordings of their assistants and evaluated them to improve speech recognition. The employees were given things that were not meant for their ears, including talking about drug trafficking, health problems or pleasurable sounds during sex.
This week, the Hamburg Data Protection Commissioner Johannes Caspar has opened a lawsuit against Google in order to suspend the evaluation for three months. Google stopped the evaluation of voice recordings from the Google Assistant in the European Union on its own initiative. Apple has also suspended the manual evaluation of voice input at Siri, unlike Google but globally. In addition, Apple has announced that in a future version of the software to obtain the explicit permission for subsequent listening to recordings by employees.
