FeatureScience & Tech

Amazon now lets you stop human review of your Alexa recordings

An Amazon Echo Spot smart speaker photographed on a kitchen counter, taken on January 9, 2019. (Photo by Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

After Apple and Google, Amazon has reportedly added the option for users to choose if they want their conversations with Alexa to be reviewed by humans for quality control.
According to Bloomberg, Amazon will now allow users to opt-out of human review of their voice recordings. The new policy took effect Friday and
Amazon said that it will update the information it provides the customers to make its practices more clear. Earlier this week, Apple temporarily disabled its Siri grading program, which allowed its contractors to listen in even private conversations of users.
Increased public and political scrutiny of data privacy practices have forced greater transparency from Silicon Valley companies, with Google pausing reviews of audio recordings from its Google assistant service for all purposes in all languages, after a leak of Dutch audio data.
Earlier this week, Apple acknowledged that its third-party contractors apparently listen to your conversations to grade the responses on various factors like if Siri was activated mistakenly or deliberately during a conversation or if the response given by Siri for a particular query was appropriate or not.
The company also claimed that reviewers only listen to a small part of the recordings. And only one percent of daily Siri activations are used for grading purposes. The recordings are reportedly not associated with an Apple ID.