As reported in Venture Beat on August 3, 2019, Amazon has almost silently announced that Alexa users are now able to choose to block human reviewers from listening to their recordings. Although this human listening is intended to provide quality assurance that the AI is performing as instructed, it does introduce creepy Big Brother Is Always Listening into our lives.
In a statement provided to VentureBeat about the change, Amazon spokesperson said:
We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures. For Alexa, we already offer customers the ability to opt-out of having their voice recordings used to help develop new Alexa features. The voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests. We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear.
To disable the ability for humans to hear your recordings taken by Alexa:
- Open the Amazon Alexa app.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Alexa Privacy .
- Tap Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa.
- Disable all options
