In a new development, Alexa users now have an option to decide if they want the Amazon.com to listen and record their voice recordings via Alexa. The company has taken this step in order to protect its customer’s privacy. Earlier the company has faced huge criticism that its customer’s privacy is being violated.
Amazon’s new privacy policy came into effect on Friday. As per the new policy now the customers have the power to control their audio data. The users are now allowed to block their audio recordings being analyzed by the company’s employees and contractors. A spokesperson from the Amazon explained, through an option that is present in the settings menu of the Alexa smartphone app permits users to do away with their recordings from a collection. The company is following the same footstep that Apple Inc and Google took in order to safeguard the privacy of its customers.
This was first reported by the online portal Bloomberg a few months ago that the Seattle Company had a group of thousands of employees across the world who analyses Alexa’s Audio recordings in order to improve the software. The employees and contractors listen as well as transcribe the voice recordings. A number of workers also had access to customer’s personal data that also includes their first names as well as their location while reviewing the voice recordings. In this regard, the Company said that a number of audio snippets were being manually analyzed. However, companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri were also found to be using the customer’s audio recording for other purposes.
Google took the decision to stop the progress of the reviewing process when Germany’s privacy regulator started inspecting the programme. Previous to this Apple is also supposed to suspend its manual evaluation of its voice assistance programme Siri.
The Amazon spokeswoman wrote in an email on Friday “We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures. We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear.”
Previously Amazon did not disclose that it performs the manual review of the audio recordings in its product’s terms and conditions. But now the company said its Alexa App will take account of a disclaimer the settings list of options that will grant permission to its users to allow if they want the company to use their voice snippets for reviewing via Alexa. This can be done by heading to the Settings then tapping the Alexa Privacy option present within the app and after that tap Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa that further says “With this setting on, your voice recordings may be used to develop new features and manually reviewed to help improve our services. Only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings is manually reviewed.”
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