Should you be concerned about your Alexa device?

Should you be concerned about your Alexa device? 

Should you be concerned about Alexa device? You might be wondering why it even matters that Alexa is always listening or accidentally recording your conversations in your Beacon Hill luxury condo. It’s not like anyone can access these recordings, right? Wrong. Bloomberg reported that Amazon employs hundreds of people to read and annotate the transcripts that our smart devices upload to the cloud, which is intended to improve Alexa’s processing power and enable the device to respond more accurately to requests. While this is “not necessarily surprising to someone who is familiar with how machine learning works,” A spokeperson stated, “it’s not something you would expect from a policy statement, such as ‘we may use this data to improve our services.’ That doesn’t really suggest that someone is listening to what you are saying to your Alexa in your bedroom.”

Amazon Confirms your worse fears -Sort of

Amazon confirmed  that their employees only listen to “a fraction of one percent of interactions” in order to keep improving the Alexa experience. Thankfully, you can opt out of having your recordings viewed through Alexa’s privacy settings, and Amazon insists that those employees “do not have access to personal information including customer names, account numbers, device identifiers or location information.” However, the spokesperson stresses that “you really need to trust these companies that they are only recording when you say the wake word, because there is a live microphone in these devices. With any software update that comes to the device, that could change.” The expert in managing privacy in complex socio-technological systems fears that one day, these smart speakers “could be recording the whole time.” Whether or not this specific threat actually looms in the near future, we should all be aware of the reduced privacy that we are accepting when we purchase a smart speaker.

Additionally, Amazon highlights the other major privacy concern of having a smart speaker: “whatever you say to the device might be used for additional information about you,” and “there are not enough limitations on what Amazon or other companies can actually do with this data.” What many of us don’t realize is that “speech is actually a very rich medium. Voice can tell you whether it’s a man or a woman speaking, it can give you an estimate of how old the person is speaking. If there’s background noise, you might know that there are children in the household. All of these things are interesting to companies like Amazon, but also Google and other companies, to get a better or more accurate picture of who you are in order to better target advertising and promotional materials to you,” explains Schaub.

Bottom Line

So, before you plug in your new Alexa into your Midtown luxury condo and train it to recognize your voice, you might want to consider whether you are comfortable revealing your personal information to Amazon. 

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