Thousands of Amazon workers are listening in on Echo audio, report says

[Fasterthannothing]

Just like the title say Amazon has hired people to listen to people's conversations with Alexa including sensitive information.

Quote

Citing sources who have worked on the project, Bloomberg reports Amazon tasks outside contractors, as well as full-time Amazon employees, to comb through snippets of audio from Echo devices to help train Alexa, the company's voice-enabled assistant.

The clips include not both explicit Alexa commands and background conversations. Echo devices are constantly scanning audio for a trigger phrase -- "Alexa," "Echo" or "computer" -- which when deciphered activates the assistant and initiates a connection to Amazon's servers. Audio recordings begin shortly thereafter.

With Echo in homes and offices, workers expectedly hear users discussing people by name or run across customers talking about sensitive topics like banking information, the report said. When snippets contain personal information, workers are instructed to mark the clip as "critical data" and move on.

With human intervention, Amazon is able to teach Alexa's software to recognize and respond to certain words and phrases. Like most voice-recognition technology, Alexa is powered by artificial intelligence, but the system requires training by human operators, in this case workers based out of Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania. These people can listen to up to 1,000 clips per day, the report said.

Honestly this is why I don't like things like Alexa. I've always trusted Alexa less than Google's home devices just because they always seem to be in the news for sending voice information to Amazon. I'm sure Google home does also but still things like this just affirm my feelings of Amazon's sketchy Alexa. 

 

Another source also says the information is not anonymous

Quote

an account number, first name, and the device's serial number are associated with the recording. 

 

 

Source:https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/10/thousands-of-amazon-workers-are-listening-to-echo-conversations-report-says/amp/

 

Source 2:  www.macrumors.com/2019/04/10/amazon-employees-alexa-voice-recordings/amp

[Fasauceome]

and this comes as a surprise to exactly 0 people

[ARikozuM]

Reason #107 for why the US needs GDPR and revised privacy laws. 

 

I do like having Siri though. Personal digital assistants are the bee's knees when I'm outside gardening, doing woodwork, or looking things up during lab. We need laws that protect our data and put the profits in the user's pockets. 

[Janeck]

This kind of articles always remind me that random laughing from Alexa. I'm still thinking that She's laughing all the time but in some kind of silent mode  ... 

Srsly i don't like when tech news web has manufacturer in name of it. It looks sketchy to me as well.
 

[mynameisjuan]

Many these click bait titles.

 

Hired employees are listening to snippets to catch when people are revealing sensitive data to gather data for AI to find and remove these recordings.

 

This isn't malicious, quite opposite really and when listening to 1000 clips a day. Man you forget that shit so fast.

[Bananasplit_00]

I still do not understand how you could want one of these in your home? Yah let's just spend money to plant a bug in my house, AMAZING idea! 

[Jito463]

27 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

I still do not understand how you could want one of these in your home? Yah let's just spend money to plant a bug in my house, AMAZING idea! 

Pretty much this.  I don't trust any of them and never will.

[Trik'Stari]

Funny considering that the voice-to-text function on your android phone records EVERYTHING and google just keeps that data. This is enable by default, and you have to turn it off yourself, and they make it really hard to turn off.

 

Dale Gribble would be disappointed in all of us.

[YaBoiWill]

And this is why I don't have smart home crap, or google assistant enabled, and a bit of tape over my laptop mic, and no mic at all on my desktop, and programs to make 172 windows telemetry things go to 0.0.0.0 instead of Microsoft. 

I think we need to have more control over our data, just because we blindly agreed to the thousand page contract things doesn't mean we become data cash cows

[Trik'Stari]

Just now, YaBoiWill said:

And this is why I don't have smart home crap, or google assistant enabled, and a bit of tape over my laptop mic, and no mic at all on my desktop, and programs to make 172 windows telemetry things go to 0.0.0.0 instead of Microsoft. 

I think we need to have more control over our data, just because we blindly agreed to the thousand page contract things doesn't mean we become data cash cows

Except that the thousand page contract probably states "you are now our property, cash cows"

[YaBoiWill]

Just now, Trik'Stari said:

Except that the thousand page contract probably states "you are now our property, cash cows"

Never been so board that I read it. 

I got out of having a black box for insurance on my car because I said it was an invasion of my privacy for them to collect where I was, and then share it with third parties. 

they can track my phone much easier as most of the time I'm on Waze 

[RejZoR]

This is why I don't want any of this shit anywhere near me. I still somewhat trust Siri because I believe Apple is keeping things ethical and as local to the device as possible and it's also why it's not the best of "assistants". Because they aren't doing this. I could be wrong, but there was never any doubt about this shit for Google and Amazon.

[79wjd]

7 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

I still do not understand how you could want one of these in your home? Yah let's just spend money to plant a bug in my house, AMAZING idea! 

Convenience outweighs the person's desire to keep certain thoughts private in the, let's be honest, still unlikely event anyone gives enough of a shit about the thought to do anything with it.

[RejZoR]

37 minutes ago, 79wjd said:

Convenience outweighs the person's desire to keep certain thoughts private in the, let's be honest, still unlikely event anyone gives enough of a shit about the thought to do anything with it.

It's why companies do this because people have this kind of ignorant mentality. "They can't do anything useful with it" or "I have nothing to hide". It's why Facebook and Amazon has grown into such massive careless blobs of data mining. Because no one objects it, no one minds it, but it's still beyond fucked up.

 

And it also shows how fucked up privacy policies Amazon has if they have employees playing customer audio snippets on internal audio communication channels for fucking amusement. That's unacceptable on every possible level and should NEVER happen in a multibillion company that allegedly has shit sorted out as a company. Mind blowing bs.

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Funny considering that the voice-to-text function on your android phone records EVERYTHING and google just keeps that data. This is enable by default, and you have to turn it off yourself, and they make it really hard to turn off.

Well, they don't make it particularly easy, but I wouldn't say it's really hard.  I've turned it off on my phone.

[lewdicrous]

9 hours ago, fasauceome said:

and this comes as a surprise to exactly 0 people

I'm surprised they weren't caught earlier

[HarryNyquist]

Next comes Twitter/FB/etc being caught listening through some surreptitious loophole of permissions.

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, HarryNyquist said:

Next comes Twitter/FB/etc being caught listening through some surreptitious loophole of permissions.

Well, FB was already called out for asking people to send in their nudes so they could "block" them from being posted.  At this point, almost nothing would surprise me about any of them.

[Delicieuxz]

And the US government is also listening in on Echo devices.

 

Amazon won't say if it hands your Echo data to the government

[iTakeThings]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

It's why companies do this because people have this kind of ignorant mentality. "They can't do anything useful with it" or "I have nothing to hide". It's why Facebook and Amazon has grown into such massive careless blobs of data mining. Because no one objects it, no one minds it, but it's still beyond fucked up.

 

And it also shows how fucked up privacy policies Amazon has if they have employees playing customer audio snippets on internal audio communication channels for fucking amusement. That's unacceptable on every possible level and should NEVER happen in a multibillion company that allegedly has shit sorted out as a company. Mind blowing bs.

I don’t believe it’s for “amusement”. I doubt amazon pays groups of employees to just sit in a circle and listen to audio snippets for the fun of it. They are trying to make the product work better. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Literally that simple. 

[Velcade]

7 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Funny considering that the voice-to-text function on your android phone records EVERYTHING and google just keeps that data. This is enable by default, and you have to turn it off yourself, and they make it really hard to turn off.

 

Dale Gribble would be disappointed in all of us.

If you turn it off the voice-to-text function doesn't work. I tried because I thought why do they need to save my data.  Turned it off and boom VTT didn't work anymore.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, iTakeThings said:

I don’t believe it’s for “amusement”. I doubt amazon pays groups of employees to just sit in a circle and listen to audio snippets for the fun of it. They are trying to make the product work better. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Literally that simple. 

Because it never stops people from doing it through their own unofficial channels, which is what I got from the report. And when people use what one would consider private data in such a way, that's fucked up and shouldn't be happening.

[Eaglerino]

Anyone with a smartphone complaining about this is a hypocrite

[Syntaxvgm]

49 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Anyone with a smartphone complaining about this is a hypocrite

yep. 

[mr moose]

Not to start a war, but the article doesn't tell/evidence us that they are doing something untoward with said recordings.  In fact it simply identifies that some employees are retelling funny stories internally and that others are not properly equipped to deal with the more nasty things they hear.

 

It does not say if they delete them after a certain period like apple or what they do with that data outside of train the digital assistant. In fact it gives us nothing but an insinuation that Alexa is recording all the time.

 

3 hours ago, iTakeThings said:

I don’t believe it’s for “amusement”. I doubt amazon pays groups of employees to just sit in a circle and listen to audio snippets for the fun of it. They are trying to make the product work better. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Literally that simple. 

 

I seriously have my concerns and don't trust it (why I don't have any of them in my house), but you are dead right until we have decent proof of something else happening, if you don't like it don't buy.