Be Careful: Amazon Employees Are Allegedly Listening To Every Word You Say To Alexa
If you are one of the millions of people who have an Alexa device, than you more than likely find yourself talking to her constantly. Whether you want her to turn on your favorite song or simply want to know what the weather will be tomorrow, she’s always there to help you with your needs.
But we’ve got some no so great news: It turns out that teams working at Amazon could allegedly be listening to everything you say to her. Amazon employees all around the world listen to and transcribe everything we say to her–up to 1,000 audio clips a day.
Don’t worry, it’s for a good reason: to help enhance Alexa’s ability to understand speech.”This information 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,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fox News in a written statement.
Most of the time, we’re not saying anything too embarrassing. But the problem is, many times the workers can even hear background noise that’s going on if you have your Alexa is on–even if you’re not talking directly to her.
In order to do this job, the workers must sign nondisclosure agreements that forbids them from sharing any info they hear. That even includes potential criminal conduct. It’s reported, however, that employees sometimes speak to each other via internal chat rooms to talk about anything amusing they might hear.
But what about really personal things…like bank or credit card details? Their contract states that they’e supposed to mark the file as “critical data” and nothing else.
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” the Amazon spokesperson stated. “We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order to improve the customer experience.”
How do you feel about Amazon listening to us talk to our Alexas?
Featured image source: Pexels / source https://www.bloomberg.com/
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