Amazon Just Got Busted For Paying Its Employees To Listen To Conversations Through Alexa

Source - Amazon employs thousands of workers who listen to voice recordings captured by the company’s Echo “smart” speaker devices in people’s homes, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

The employees include both full-time Amazon employees and contract workers located across the globe, from Boston to India, the new service notes. Their job — to transcribe the recordings and annotate them, then feed them back into Amazon’s software. The goal is to improve human speech comprehension in Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. 

The issue raises privacy concerns at a time consumers are becoming more sensitive to the issue, especially when technology companies don’t fully disclose how their personal data is used. For instance, Amazon doesn’t explicitly tell consumers that its workers are listening to their conversations with Alexa, Bloomberg reports. Instead, it says, “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions.

Amazon defends its practices, with a spokesperson saying in a statement that the company uses an “extremely small number” of customer interactions with voice-powered devices in order to improve the service. 

“This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone,” the (Amazon)  spokesperson said, noting that customers have the right to delete their voice recordings.”

People are up in arms about this and I genuinely don’t understand why. You really care if some dude in India hears your Seamless order on a Wednesday night? No. You just care if they get it right. Our entire lives are already recorded whether we like it or not, so what does it matter? It’s not like they’re going to stop. As long as you’re not talking about blowing up a building, you have nothing to worry about. I don’t even want to know if I’m being listened to because then all I’ll do is think about it. I’ve got enough on my mind. Just don’t steal my money. Besides, they say it’s “improving the user experience” which is all that matters. Have you ever had Alexa screw something up? It’s infuriating.

The real concern here is that Amazon has access to tap into your Alexa if they want to, which is slightly problematic but again, not something I’m going to lose sleep over. And the people who do, like Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan can kick rocks.

“You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home,” Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues with smart speakers, told Bloomberg. “I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

We know it’s happening, babe, stop stressing everyone out over it. People buy Alexa to teach it to swear, maybe turn on the lights and play a song or two. Leave it alone. Ignorance is bliss. You have to figure they’re going to listen to a few conversations along the way. I would. Ever since I asked Alexa where I could get Chinese food and she responded with, “I don’t know, you idiot bitch” I figured they were listening to me anyways.

Whatever, I’m not dying on this hill. I trust the safeguards. If you’re really worried you can instruct Alexa to not “use your voice recording to develop new products” and it’ll turn off. End of story.