Remember: At the beginning of April, Bloomberg announced that millions of Amazon employees listen to everything you ask Alexa through an Echo speaker. The group employs thousands of people worldwide to improve the performance of its smart assistant. They are responsible for analyzing, classifying and listing all requests recorded by Alexa. On the other hand, Jeff Bezos’ firm assured. “Employees do not have direct access to personally identifiable or account information.”
Echo: Amazon employees can identify you from your address
According to a new report from BloombergAmazon employees actually identify you by your geographic location. When you communicate with your Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Spot or Echo Show speakers, we find geolocation among the recorded data. In some cases, employees could also access phone numbers and contacts saved in the Alexa app.
From there, employees simply enter these coordinates into a mapping service like Google Maps or Maps. find home address. It is therefore entirely possible to get back to you and find out where each audio recording came from. In fact, there is no indication that employees are using available data to find out who is behind a record. Bloomberg claims it got its information from Amazon employees who participated in these wiretaps. Not surprisingly, they all signed non-disclosure agreements. That’s why they want to remain anonymous.
Faced with this new disclosure, Amazon “Access to the internal tools is highly controlled and only given to a very limited number of employees who need these tools to train and improve the service by analyzing a very small sample of interaction”. The firm does not deny Bloomberg’s accusations, but is trying to minimize its size.
“Our policy strictly prohibits employees from accessing or using user data for any other purpose.[…]. We regularly control and limit employee access to these internal tools.” group assures. What do you think of this new reveal? Worried about your privacy?
