Not only is Amazon’s Alexa listening in when you speak, an Amazon employee might be listening in too. Amazon has teams around the world transcribing the audio captured through its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Thousands of full-time workers and contractors around the world listen to hundreds of audio clips for Amazon everyday. Some of the audio clips they listen to were described as “possibly criminal,” including listening to what was thought to be a sexual assault.
When commands are detected, some of the audio is being fed to workers at amazon or private contractors in countries around the world. They transcribe the audio and feed it back into the system to help improve the software’s speech recognition.
People can opt out of allowing Amazon to use their voice recordings by changing the privacy settings.
Photo: Image adapted from: “Wiretapping the Lives of the Others” by Jens Best and “alexa amazon echo dot” by Stock Catalog are licensed under CC BY 2.0
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