Privacy at stake? Amazon could be eavesdropping on user conversations to make Alexa smarter

Amazon’s Echo range of smart speakers seems to have won over Indian households, but taking Amazon’s Alexa into confidence may not be a very good idea. The Seattle-based company unveiled more than a dozen new products last week, many of which are integrated with the company’s voice assistant Alexa.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employs people to listen in to conversations users have with Alexa, a revelation which was not refuted by the tech giant. The new devices on show include Echo Loop (Alexa-enabled ring to be worn on one’s finger), Echo Frames (Alexa eyeglasses), and Echo Buds (Alexa earbuds).

All these devices take forward Amazon’s ambition to make Alexa ubiquitous, an end whose means include recording audio to train the algorithm to become more efficient. However, with greater regulatory scrutiny on Big Tech, Dave Limp, a top Amazon executive, said that the company wants to make right the negative perception surrounding its data privacy policies.


However, the promise of greater controls over what users chose to share with Alexa – an invisible presence, privy to intimate conversations in most homes – seem forced, at best. Alexa has adapted to Indian accents and has become better at understanding and servicing requests from users in the subcontinent, an achievement impossible without greater involvement of artificial intelligence and machine language tools with a feedback loop.



In Amazon’s defence, people seem to care little about how data collected by their smart speakers is used. The biggest validation of Amazon’s policies is evidenced in the sales figures of its Echo speakers. Many customers seem to believe that the convenience afforded by Alexa is worth the privacy trade off.

At the unveiling of the 2018 batch of the Echo range, not even a single mention of privacy was made in the 80-minute presentation, a testament to the company’s conviction that people will, reservations notwithstanding, accept its terms of service. With regulators raining their guns on tech companies, Amazon’s Dave Limp said last week that users will now be given the option to automatically delete their voice data on three-month and 18-month cycles.

However, users will not be allowed to automatically delete voice data on a daily basis, with the reason being that by doing so, the voice assistant will not have the requisite data to get smarter if there were no data to fine-tune its self-learning neural network. Amazon and other tech companies in the virtual assistant game record human-machine interactions and transcribe the conversation, a practice called “supervised learning.”

Given the extent to which Alexa has improved, it is safe to assume that Amazon staff and contract workers have been listening in on millions of hours’ worth of conversation, transcribing, and annotating the text to make Alexa smarter. The company’s default privacy setting assumes that users permit strangers – individuals authorized by Amazon – to access their voice recordings. The company’s new feature does not come as default, and even if people opt out of sharing their data, it will be available to the company for at least three months.

Amazon’s next play comes in the wearable market, where its Alexa-enabled earbuds will be able to listen in on more conversations than its smart speakers. The experimental eyewear and ring are invitation-only and limited quantities will be manufactured. With a toehold in the wearables segment, Amazon will be able to glean information about user behavior, routines, and location data, which are currently the purview of software companies like Google.

This is, however, the first time that Amazon has mentioned data privacy, even in passing. But if Alexa is to get smarter, Amazon will have to strike a tenuous balance between its expansionist plans and the sanctity of its customers’ data.