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- Dec 3, 2017
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I don't have one, but my daughter does. I have spent lots of time at her place, so Alexa has been listening to all the prepping videos I have watched.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019...mazon-employees-listening-alexa-conversations
Busted: Thousands Of Amazon Employees Listening To Alexa Conversations
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/11/2019 - 05:25
Amazon employs thousands of people to listen in on what people around the world are saying to their Alexa digital assistant, according to what is sure to be a Congressional hearing-inspiring report by Bloomberg, which cites seven people who have worked on the program.
While their job is to "help improve" NSAlexa - which powers the company's line of Echo speakers - the team "listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices," which are then transcribed, annotated and fed back into the software in order to try and improve Alexa's understanding of human speech for more successful interactions. In other words, humans are effectively helping to train Amazon's algorithm.
In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa “lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter.” But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching. -Bloomberg
terms of use, the company collects and stores most of what you say to Alexa - including the geolocation of the product along with your voice instructions, reported CNBC's Todd Haselton last November.
Your messages, communication requests (e.g., "Alexa, call Mom"), and related instructions are "Alexa interactions," as described in the Alexa Terms of Use. Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions and related information in the cloud in order to respond to your requests (e.g., "Send a message to Mom"), to provide additional functionality (e.g., speech to text transcription and vice versa), and to improve our services. -Amazon Terms of Use
Alexa, are you spying on me?
Alexa: *coughs* No, of course not.
Last May, an Amazon Echo recorded a conversation between a husband and wife, then sent it to one of the husband's phone contacts. Amazon claims that during the conversation someone used a word that sounded like "Alexa," which caused the device to begin recording.
"Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa,’" said Amazon in a statement. "Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely."
The wife, Danielle, however said that the Echo never requested her permission to send the audio. "At first, my husband was like, ‘No, you didn’t,’" Danielle told KIRO7. "And he’s like, ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘Oh gosh, you really did!’"
Can you disable?
Alexa does allow people to stop sharing their voice recordings for the development of new features, while a screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that the recordings provided to Alexa's listeners do not provide the full name or address of a user. It does, however, link the recording to an account number, the user's first name, and the device's serial number.
"You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home," said UMich professor Florian Schaub, who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. "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."
"Whether that’s a privacy concern or not depends on how cautious Amazon and other companies are in what type of information they have manually annotated, and how they present that information to someone," added Schaub.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019...mazon-employees-listening-alexa-conversations
Busted: Thousands Of Amazon Employees Listening To Alexa Conversations
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/11/2019 - 05:25
Amazon employs thousands of people to listen in on what people around the world are saying to their Alexa digital assistant, according to what is sure to be a Congressional hearing-inspiring report by Bloomberg, which cites seven people who have worked on the program.
While their job is to "help improve" NSAlexa - which powers the company's line of Echo speakers - the team "listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices," which are then transcribed, annotated and fed back into the software in order to try and improve Alexa's understanding of human speech for more successful interactions. In other words, humans are effectively helping to train Amazon's algorithm.
In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa “lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter.” But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching. -Bloomberg
terms of use, the company collects and stores most of what you say to Alexa - including the geolocation of the product along with your voice instructions, reported CNBC's Todd Haselton last November.
Your messages, communication requests (e.g., "Alexa, call Mom"), and related instructions are "Alexa interactions," as described in the Alexa Terms of Use. Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions and related information in the cloud in order to respond to your requests (e.g., "Send a message to Mom"), to provide additional functionality (e.g., speech to text transcription and vice versa), and to improve our services. -Amazon Terms of Use
Alexa, are you spying on me?
Alexa: *coughs* No, of course not.
Last May, an Amazon Echo recorded a conversation between a husband and wife, then sent it to one of the husband's phone contacts. Amazon claims that during the conversation someone used a word that sounded like "Alexa," which caused the device to begin recording.
"Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa,’" said Amazon in a statement. "Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely."
The wife, Danielle, however said that the Echo never requested her permission to send the audio. "At first, my husband was like, ‘No, you didn’t,’" Danielle told KIRO7. "And he’s like, ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘Oh gosh, you really did!’"
Can you disable?
Alexa does allow people to stop sharing their voice recordings for the development of new features, while a screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that the recordings provided to Alexa's listeners do not provide the full name or address of a user. It does, however, link the recording to an account number, the user's first name, and the device's serial number.
"You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home," said UMich professor Florian Schaub, who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. "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."
"Whether that’s a privacy concern or not depends on how cautious Amazon and other companies are in what type of information they have manually annotated, and how they present that information to someone," added Schaub.
