Much to public paranoia’s confirmation, it appears that Amazon might be using human employees to listen to Alexa and Echo users, after all. In short, Alexa not only listens when you talk to an Echo smart speaker, but an Amazon employee also listens potentially.
According to a recent Forbes report, Amazon employees a team of experts to transcribe conversations after a certain, designated “wake” word is spoken into an Alexa or Echo smart microphone. These employees work full-time, employed by Amazon from all around the world, including locations in the United States, Romania, and Costa Rica. Shifts purportedly last up to nine or ten hours and involve scanning and listening to thousands of hours of audio recorded from various Alexa speakers around the country. The workers report mostly “mundane” audio, though sometimes they overhear potentially criminal activity. One employee claimed to have witnessed what sounded like a sexual assault in progress.
As a means of finding a loophole through the obvious privacy concerns brought up by Alexa customers, Amazon claims that, while they never blatantly mentioned employing human beings to monitor and observe speech recorded by Alexa, they disclose their use of “requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.”
Although Amazon and Alexa customers can choose to opt out of the program, there is no guarantee that their privacy is safe, especially considering all of the recent privacy breaches. Amazon representatives have attempted to calm public outcry by assuring that no audio is stored for long periods. Furthermore, employees are not granted access to any identifying information. According to Amazon, customer information is encrypted and treated with the highest classification.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has been caught in some seemingly shady behavior. Just last year, an Amazon Alexa customer was appalled to find that a brand new Amazon Alexa Echo device had recorded a conversation and sent it to an employee in Seattle without the customer’s consent. When this outraged customer brought the complaint to Amazon, they promptly apologized, admitting that the particular Alexa’s course of action was the result of an internal error and nothing more.
A lot of controversies surrounded the concept of artificial intelligence. From old B-movies about technological or “robotic” revolutions to unskilled laborers losing their jobs, AI is a growing fear for most people. There, at the forefront of the new age of AI, is Amazon, a pioneer in programming technology. The company’s prestigious position doesn’t mesh well with the supposedly ensuing threat of artificial intelligence. Combine these facts with the ever-growing anti-privacy scare. People are always at risk of losing their valuable information to someone over the internet. With Facebook’s recent accusations of selling private information, many have opted for much tighter security measures and avoid any tech that might give away their privacy. How will news of their secret workforce bode for Amazon?