“All information is treated with confidentiality,” says Amazon as they have confirmed that they listen to Alexa recordings.
Amazon have said to listen to “an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recording.” However, they reassured users of Alexa devices that they take their security and privacy seriously. They said that they do so for training purposes which aim to help Alexa understand better speech recognition, natural language and requests.
“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. 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.”
– Amazon
Amazon’s help page said that the company associate buyers’ requests with their Amazon account to accept their voice recordings and access other Amazon services in a bid to deliver them a personalised experience.
In the past, Amazon have received bad publicity over the alleged use of Alexa for listening to shoppers’ personal conversations. However, Amazon have debunked the rumours by explaining that it used the devices’ recordings to create personalised experiences for their shoppers.
