Smart speakers such as Amazon Echo are extremely popular right now.
According to reports, over 14 million people in the US alone bought one of these devices in the past year, bringing the number of owners to a staggering 53 million .
Sure, these gadgets are super useful & very effective at the art of simplifying busy, demanding lifestyles. However, it seems that this convenience might very well be achieved at a cost to personal privacy. What? I heard you say…personal privacy invasion? Oh no, not another one!
Nevertheless, this boundary overstepping, appears to be a phenomenon, which is a provable fact & broadly excused by smart speaker vendors(Including Google & Apple), as a necessary means of training voice recognition algorithms to better understand your requests.
Alexa records all voice data once its ‘Wake Command’ is heard. It means that if you’re asking your device to locate the nearest sex shop or prices for a getaway trip from the wife, someone on Amazon’s staff might very well be listening in on your rather personal, & possibly embarrassing conversation (even if Alexa hears a command by mistake, say if you have the TV on, and it ‘thinks’ you’ve issued a command, it will then record all background conversation).
Amazon promises that it is difficult for the eavesdropper to associate the recording to the speaker, but facts show that connective information, such as your device’s identification number are shared with the Amazon staff member assigned to the task.
So how to stop Amazon Echo from listening to your recordings?
Honestly, this sounds like a modern but very real version of George Orwell’s book, 1984. However, the novel is a distopian fiction, not something we ever envisioned as a element we would willingly invite into our homes. These rather nasty revelations were part of an exposé published by Bloomberg on April 11 this year. Amazon, hearing protest(which has been rather loud) has now given users the option to delete the current day’s recordings.
Additionally, they are planning a feature which will enable consumers to issue a command to delete anything they’ve just said. These new commands, which are part of the new Alexa Privacy Hub, will certainly ease a few worried users’ minds, but it is worth noting that any data recorded more than a day prior, will not, currently, be a candidate for this deletion tool.
Thousands of freelancers & permanent staff members, located in various countries around the world (like Budapest), are employed to listen to recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes. The snippets are transcribed, analyzed & feed back into the algorithm, so that the software can ‘learn’ from actual human commands.
If you wish to opt out of this system, you can elect this option in your Echo’s settings. To use delete commands you need to set up the ‘Enable Voice Deletion’ feature. In the app’s ‘Settings’, choose ‘Alexa Account’, next, select ‘Alexa Privacy’, & lastly, ‘Review Voice History’, then you’re able to toggle the deletion option.
If you’re still concerned you can manually delete recordings in the app by selecting ‘History’, tapping on a recording, & then selecting delete. Although this is a laborious process, it will ensure your privacy & peace of mind.
