Amazon Has Thousands Of Workers Listening To What You Tell Alexa

The concept of a smart speaker is good, but in reality, there are some legitimate concerns that some have, such as whether or not companies are listening to you and recording what you tell your device. If you are one of those people with such concerns, then you might want to rethink whether or not it might be a good idea to keep a smart speaker in your home.

This is because in a report from Bloomberg, the publication has revealed that Amazon has a team of thousands of workers who are listening to what you tell Alexa, its digital assistant which can be found on many Echo devices that the company has since sold. Now before you get too alarmed, it seems that this is more about analyzing speech in a bid to improve Alexa, and less about spying on customers to sell their personal information.

Amazon has since confirmed that this is true in a statement that reads, “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience.” The company adds, “We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”

The report also highlights how for the most part this can be a rather mundane job as most requests are pretty boring. There have been some instances where disturbing bits of conversation can be heard, but apparently Amazon has policies in place to help employees deal with distressing audio clips.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Alexa, Amazon, Privacy, Social Hit