Amazon Stores Alexa Voice Recordings with Third-Party Skill Developers

One of the most popular AI-based voice assistants in the world is Amazon’s Alexa. This is considered by many to be better than Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. It is also a subject on privacy that has seen new developments surface in the form of a letter in reply to concerns by a US senator. A statement is mentioned through this letter is that Amazon stores voice recordings and transcripts recorded by Alexa indefinitely, and even share some of this data with third-party skill developers.

According to the report by Cnet, United States Senator sent a letter to Jeff Bezos in May, seeking answers on Alexa. Amazon’s vice president of public policy ‘Brian Huseman’ made a statement that Amazon stores voice recordings and transcripts of the same indefinitely, these can only be removed and manually deleted by the users. Moreover, some of the transcripts are not deleted even if the users have deleted the actual audio recordings.

In the case of privacy point-of-view, Amazon may be sharing some of the data with third-party skill developers for Alexa. In the letter, it states that these skill developers may retain records of Alexa requests that are transactional, like ordering food online or calling for a taxi. All of this firmly falls within the domain of non-public data i.e. personal information, and Amazon storing this data may be introduced as a major privacy issue. Amazon and other voice-assistant developers also persist that recordings and data are maintained unknowingly to continue to improve responses, services, and specific abilities. There is always a possibility of this data being misused in the future. At the basic level, it might be used for specific profiling to deliver targeted ads and products to users. 

To get contact with Amazon, users may also delete information, but some of these data cannot be removed entirely. All of these are particularly considering and concerning that Amazon’s Alexa devices are largely placed in the most private places. This particular handset Alexa is previously used on Echo speakers and smart displays such as the Amazon Echo Show. These products have the capacity to record both sounds as well as visuals. 

Read More Article: Amazon Delete Voice Recordings Alexa