(WSVN) - What you say in your home doesn’t necessarily stay in your home if you have a digital assistant.
A new report from Bloomberg claims Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa.
“If you use these assistants, just beware that your conversation’s being heard by another human,” said Loup Ventures managing director Gene Munster.
Amazon hired thousands of full-time employees and contractors across the globe whose sole job is to listen to customer voice recordings captured through smart speakers.
The workers thoroughly review 1,000 audio clips per shift, each picked from random devices.
It’s an effort to improve Alexa’s response to human voices.
“In some respects, it’s not surprising that thousands of people are listening to these requests,” Munster said, “because in order for the machine to learn and [artificial intelligence] to get better, it needs that kind of nudge in the right direction.”
In a statement released to Bloomberg, Amazon clarified that it doesn’t monitor all of your conversations.
“We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience,” the statement read.
The company also said customers’ privacy, security and personal information are taken “seriously.”
“They should have let people know that other humans are listening to them,” Munster said.
Amazon says users can disable the voice recordings for development use by changing the privacy settings in the Alexa app.
However, some conversations may still end up being reviewed by the company.
Employees on Amazon’s team are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, barring them from discussing the program.
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