Scores of people around the world are freaking out & unplugging their Amazon Alexa devices. This after news broke that Amazon employs thousands to listen to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes & offices.
According to the Bloomberg report, Amazon employs a global team that transcribes the voice commands captured after the trigger word is detected & feeds them back into the software to help improve the digital voice assistant grasp of human speech so it can respond more efficiently in the future.
But there’s no need to panic. While Amazon has confirmed the same, the company has also said it takes the security & privacy of their customers seriously. Post the panic wave, Amazon has given users the option to opt out of the human review of their voice recordings. So now we will talk about how to stop Alexa from listening to your private conversations.
We at Whats New On The Net will tell you how to disable Alexa speakers from recording private conversations & submitting it for a human review.
Disable recording
- Tap “Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa”, then turn off the toggle next to “Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features”.
Disable human review
Scroll to the bottom of the “Alexa Privacy” page & turn off the toggle next to user names at the bottom of the screen. This will block Amazon from reviewing transcriptions of messages you send with Alexa.
Delete past recordings
- Tap “Review Voice History”, then turn on the toggle next to “Enable deletion by voice”. This will all you to delete recordings by saying “Alexa, delete what I just said” or “Alexa, delete everything I said today”.
However, keep in mind that enabling this option will also mean that anyone with access to your devices can tell Alexa to delete voice recordings from your account by saying “Alexa, delete what I just said” or “Alexa, delete everything I said today”.
- Next scroll down to the option “Date Range” & select your preferred option from the drop down menu. For example, you can select “All History” & tap “Delete All Recordings for All History” to delete everything from the day you started using the speaker.
You can choose from options “Today”, “Yesterday”, “This week”, & so on.
In a statement issued by Amazon earlier this month, the company said that the voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests. Amazon has also updated information provided to customers to make our practices more clear.
Amazon has, however, not followed Apple & Google in suspending human review. Apple had announced a pause to the review program after a Guardian report revealed the existence of the grading program, & that the contractors who work on it regularly hear confidential or personal information as a result of accidental activations.
