What Exactly Amazon Alexa Does with Your Voice Data?

Shari Lynn Kramer / 31 Dec 2020

What Exactly Amazon Alexa Does with Your Voice Data? image

US Senator Chris Сoons obtained an official answer to his letter sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In the correspondence, Сoons asked concerning just how long Alexa's voice records are saved, and what this information is used for. The obtained response can not be called pleasing.

What's saved by Alexa?

Some operations, such as ordering a pizza, phoning Uber, purchasing electronic content, need Alexa to store documents automatically. But it can store and save different documents of your address too. It is possible to manually disable this choice, and however, Alexa would collect a few of your voice records. Creepy, is not it?

In addition, the user may delete just those audio recordings where his reference to this helper is present. Additionally, there are records that can't be deleted. At the request of consumer, entries can be removed from all important Amazon storage systems entirely. These factors made US attorneys and senator Coons, particularly, talk about Alexa's privacy terms.

Amazon representative’s reply

From the replying letter to the senator, Amazon vice president of public coverage, Brian Huseman attempts to assure the people that Amazon had an "ongoing effort to guarantee those transcripts don't stay in any of Alexa's additional storage systems" Alexa can save your own personal info forever and deletes it just if you delete these voice records of your discussions.

What's more significant, nevertheless there's an alternative for Alexa to store some info that was manually deleted by consumers. That can be explained by the fact that a few records, like hailing rideshare or buying pizza, contain the simple fact of the transaction, and that information is necessary to be stored for consumers.

Ahead of the senator's answer, if users needed to delete all of the discussions, they must manually telephone Amazon support and demand the deletion of the entire Alexa account. Amazon agents called this scenario a bug and fixed the matter then.

Amazon said another reason to utilize the records would be for training its own voice helper, therefore that it could evolve with time.

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