Amazon staff listen to private recordings on Alexa devices

AMAZON employees have been secretly listening to and mocking the things that customers ask Alexa, and have been sharing recordings of them in internal chat rooms, it has emerged.

Amazon customers have complained that their privacy has been violated after discovering that the company employs hundreds of people to listen to recordings of people speaking to their Alexa devices.

Employees in Romania, India, Costa Rica and the US are given recordings of people speaking to their devices in order to verify that the virtual assistant is correctly understanding instructions, according to Bloomberg. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help with a muddled word, or when the recordings are amusing.

Reviewers listen to as many as 1,000 recordings per day.

Employees claimed to have heard a possible sexual assault, which was accidentally recorded, and were also asked to review recordings of a woman singing, and a child screaming for help.

Amazon’s terms and conditions state that the company uses human reviewers to listen to some recordings to improve quality.

Bloomberg reported reviewers are able to see customers’ first names, their Amazon account numbers and the Echo serial numbers.

Apple and Google also employ reviewers to verify audio recordings for Siri and Google Home devices, but they do not see any personal information.

An Amazon spokesman said: “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order to improve the customer experience.”

“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero-tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify a person or account as part of this.”