Yes, Alexa IS spying on you
Outrage as investigators find Amazon tells workers to listen in to our conversations
‘Customer experience’
AMAZON is eavesdropping on homes across Britain with workers listening in through the firm’s Alexa speaker, an investigation has found.
In revelations that will confirm m the fears of many, it emerged that t teams tap into conversations in n what Amazon says is a system to check that devices work.
But they have picked up moments such as a woman singing badly in the shower, bank details being read out and, in two harrowing instances, overheard what sounded like a sexual assault – which workers were allegedly told to do nothing about.
Researchers warn that the company could be fined billions of pounds if they have broken data protection rules by automatically analysing recordings without users opting in.
In another significant development, the BBC reported last night that Apple and Google were using the same tactics of listening in through Siri and Google Home.
Campaigners said consumers should ‘think very carefully’ before buying the devices. It is estimated more than two million UK households own Alexas. Privacy International, based in London, accused Amazon of being ‘deliberately deceitful towards its customers’. The use of smart speakers has boomed with 13 per cent of British homes now owning an Alexa or Google Home style gadget.
But whistleblowers revealed that scores of workers based in Costa Rica, India, Romania or the US are charged with listening in. Employees and contractors sometimes hear as many as 1,000 audio clips a day each, insiders told Bloomberg. Recordings captured at homes are played back, transcribed, annotated and shared to improve Alexa’s performance.
Two auditors, based in Romania, said they heard what they believed were incidents of sexual assault but were told it was not Amazon’s job to interfere, according to Bloomberg. In one screenshot handed to the news organisation, Alexa auditors were able to see a person’s bank account n number and first name.
Amazon, which has repeatedly denied that the gadgets are spying on us, said staff do not know who they h are listening to and only a fraction ti of recordings are involved.
Privacy International said the average customer would not reasonably expect someone based in the US or in n Romania to be ‘listening to what th they say’. ‘When people buy a smart home device, they accept that a computer will record them to find answers to the question they ask. They do not consent to a human being listening as well,’ Eva Blum-Dumontet, of Privacy International said.
The device’s default setting is to allow information to be harvested. This only stops if the option is disabled. ‘How could [customers] know when this is not clearly advertised?,’ Miss Blum-Dumontet said.
Griff Ferris, of Big Brother Watch, branded the devices a form of ‘ambient surveillance. People should think very carefully before bringing one into their homes,’ he said.
An Amazon spokesman said the goal was to ‘train’ Alexa and ‘better understand requests’, adding: ‘We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings to improve the customer experience ... Employees [cannot] identify the person or account as part of this workflow.’