Amazon unveils a new version of the Echo Dot at an event on Sept. 20, 2018. A report from Bloomberg revealed that thousands of Amazon employees are listening to what people say when they talk to Alexa. Amazon said it uses these conversations to improve Alexa's "understanding of human speech." Bloomberg's report Wednesday said the voice snippets are tied to device serial numbers and the owner's first name. An Amazon spokesperson said Echo devices only make recordings after hearing a wake word like Alexa. But there's a way to prevent Amazon employees from listening in. CNBC dug through the Alexa app, and the option to share this type of information with Amazon was on by default. You can turn it off. In the Alexa app, which is available for iPhones and Android, the Alexa privacy settings page says this: Use Voice Recordings to Help Develop New Features Training Alexa with recordings from a diverse range of customers helps ensure Alexa works well for everyone. When this setting is enabled, your voice recordings may be used in the development of new features. If you turn this setting off, new features may not work well for you. The page also, by default, lets Amazon improve transcription by using the messages you send with Alexa to other people.<doc-sep>TOPSHOT - The US Capitol is seen in Washington, DC on January 22, 2018 after the US Senate reached a deal to reopen the federal government, with Democrats accepting a compromise spending bill. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) See Amazon's new wearable it says can tell if you're stressed out Dozens of AmazonBasics product are flagged as dangerous, but many are still being sold Dr. Michael Pecht of the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering looks at an AmazonBasics microwave from a customer who said it caught on fire. Andy Jassy will be Amazon's CEO. In 2019, CNN asked him if he wanted the job In an interview with CNN in 1999, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he was surprised by Amazon's success. An Amazon.com Inc. delivery driver carries boxes into a van outside of a distribution facility on February 2, 2021 in Hawthorne, California. Jeff Bezos said February 1, 2021, he would give up his role as chief executive of Amazon later this year as the tech and e-commerce giant reported a surge in profit and revenue in the holiday quarter. The announcement came as Amazon reported a blowout holiday quarter with profits more than doubling to $7.2 billion and revenue jumping 44 percent to $125.6 billion. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images) B25_25594_R James Bond (Daniel Craig) prepares to shoot in NO TIME TO DIE, an EON Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios film Credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (CNN Business) — Not only is Alexa listening when you speak to an Echo smart speaker, an Amazon employee is potentially listening, too. Amazon (AMZN) employs a global team that transcribes the voice commands captured after the wake word is detected and feeds them back into the software to help improve Alexa’s grasp of human speech so it can respond more efficiently in the future, Bloomberg reports. Amazon reportedly employs thousands of full-time workers and contractors in several countries, including the United States, Costa Rica and Romania, to listen to as many as 1,000 audio clips in shifts that last up to nine hours. The audio clips they listen to were described as “mundane” and even sometimes “possibly criminal,” including listening to a potential sexual assault. In a response to the story, Amazon confirmed to CNN Business that it hires people to listen to what customers say to Alexa. But Amazon said it takes “security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously.” The company said it only annotates an “extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers.” The report said Amazon doesn’t “explicitly” tell Alexa users that it employs people to listen to the recordings. Amazon said in its frequently asked question section that it uses “requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.” People can opt out of Amazon using their voice recordings to improve the software in the privacy settings section of the Alexa app. Bloomberg said that Alexa auditors don’t have access to the customers’ full name or address, but do have the device’s serial number and the Amazon account number associated with the device. “Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNN Business. “While 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, customers can always delete their utterances at any time.” An Amazon spokesperson clarified that no audio is stored unless the Alexa-enabled device is activated by a wake word. “By default, Echo devices are designed to detect only your chosen wake word,” a company spokesperson said. “The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word.” Amazon previously has been embroiled in controversy for privacy concerns regarding Alexa. Last year, an Echo user said the smart speaker had recorded a conversation without them knowing and sent the audio file to an Amazon employee in Seattle. Amazon confirmed the error and said the device’s always-listening microphones misheard a series of words and mistakenly sent a voice message.<doc-sep>Photo : Fabian Hurnaus ( Pexels Fun fact: Snippets of your Alexa conversations may be heard and read by thousands of Amazon employees. According to recent r eports, Amazon has an international team of employees who work to help Alexa better understand your many commands and develop new ways for the AI to interact with users. This requires them to listen to snippets of what your Echo speakers and other Alexa devices are recording. Sounds eerily familiar to us. Advertisement Not only are real people listening to you talk to (and around) Alexa, but the conversations they listen in on are being transcribed and annotated by Amazon’s employees. These transcriptions are then used to “teach” the Alexa AI to recognize more commands. If you’re sketched out by this, we understand. Especially since what you say is only kind-of, sort-of associated with your account, as Bloomberg describes: “A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa reviewers don’t provide a user’s full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number.” While you’ll never be able to stop Amazon employees from listening in on whatever you say to your Alexa, you can at least turn off any features that make this easier. For example: Open the Alexa mobile app Tap the Menu button in the upper-left of the screen Go to Alexa Account > Alexa Privacy > Manage how your data improves Alexa Turn off “Help develop new features” and “Use messages to improve transcriptions” for all profiles on your account Bloomberg notes that Amazon’s team might still analyze your Alexa recordings “by hand,” but this at least opts you out of some facet of Amazon’s voice study. The only real solution at this point is to ditch your Amazon devices altogether, but adjusting these privacy settings should hopefully help keep unnecessary third parties out of your business a little bit.<doc-sep>
A team at Amazon that includes both full-time employees and contractors listens to people's audio snippets recorded by devices with the company's Alexa assistant installed, according to a Bloomberg report. Seven people, described as having worked in Amazon's voice review program, told Bloomberg that they sometimes listen to as many as 1,000 recordings per shift, and that the recordings are associated with the customer's first name, their device's serial number, and an account number. Among other clips, these employees and contractors said they've reviewed recordings of what seemed to be a woman singing in the shower, a child screaming, and a sexual assault. Sometimes, when recordings were difficult to understand — or when they were amusing — team members shared them in an internal chat room, according to Bloomberg. In an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News, an Amazon spokesperson wrote that "an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings" is annotated, and reviewing the audio "helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone." Additionally, the spokesperson said, "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's privacy policy says that Alexa's software provides a variety of data to the company (including your use of Alexa, your Alexa Interactions, and other Alexa-enabled products), but doesn't explicitly state how employees themselves interact with the data. Apple and Google, which make two other popular voice-enabled assistants, also employ humans who review audio commands spoken to their devices; both companies say that they anonymize the recordings and don't associate them with customers' accounts. Apple's Siri sends a limited subset of encrypted, anonymous recordings to graders, who label the quality of Siri's responses. The process is outlined on page 69 of the company's security white paper. Google also saves and reviews anonymized audio snippets captured by Google Home or Assistant, and distorts the audio. On an FAQ page, Amazon states that Alexa is not recording all your conversations. Amazon's Echo smart speakers and the dozens of other Alexa-enabled devices are designed to capture and process audio, but only when a "wake word" — such as "Alexa," "Amazon," "Computer," or "Echo" — is uttered. However, Alexa devices do occasionally capture audio inadvertently and send that audio to Amazon servers or respond to it with triggered actions. In May 2018, an Echo unintentionally sent audio recordings of a woman's private conversation to one of her husband's employees. In any case, this is all a good reminder that if you'd rather keep something private, it's not a bad idea to unplug your smart speaker.