Amazon Will Store Alexa Voice Logs Forever—Unless You Delete Them
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Amazon Will Store Alexa Voice Logs Forever—Unless You Delete Them
Responding
to questions from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), Amazon admitted its efforts to
guarantee voice transcripts get deleted are ‘an ongoing effort.’
Taylor Hatmaker Published 07.03.19 4:11PM ET
If
you’re not creeped out by the omniscient little robot consensually
eavesdropping in your house, it might be time to reconsider.
Confirming
the suspicions of some privacy advocates and a member of Congress, Amazon
admitted in a letter to Congress that voice recordings stored by its Alexa
in-home assistant devices do in fact remain on the company's servers
indefinitely.
Last
month, Senator Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) wrote a letter
to Amazon pressing the company for detail on its data retention practices. His
line of questioning drew from CNET’s reporting
that Amazon retains transcripts of all interactions with its in-home Alexa
devices, even when a user manually deletes their voice history.
In his written response
to Sen. Coons, Amazon’s Vice President of Public Policy Brian Huseman
elaborated on its privacy policies, making it clear that all voice logs and
transcripts are stored with no expiration date unless a user opts to manually
delete them. And even when that data is deleted manually, some records will
still be retained.
Amazon
noted that it deletes transcripts from its “primary storage systems” when a
user deletes the corresponding voice recordings, but described the effort to
guarantee those transcripts don't live on in other places as ”an ongoing
effort.“
According
to Huseman, Amazon retains a record of a user's chats with Alexa, including
interactions with “skills”—software experiences developed by third parties like
Uber or Domino's—and those third parties can retain those records too. “Amazon
and/or the applicable skill developer obviously need to keep a record of the
transaction,” Huseman wrote, pointing to recurring requests as one example of
why retaining this data is useful.
Sen. Coons
lauded Amazon for its prompt response, but expressed concern at some of the
details the company revealed. “The extent to which this data is shared with
third parties, and how those third parties use and control that information, is
still unclear,” Coons wrote in a statement.
While it’s
not a scandal that a pizza chain might know your last order, Amazon's response
does make it clear that the company errs on the side of data hoarding rather
than making more aggressive policies around user privacy.
Given that
Amazon’s online store aims to know customers better than they know themselves,
that doesn't come as a surprise. ”Alexa is designed to get smarter every day,”
Huseman said.
Amazon
uses the transcripts it collects as a way to train its home assistant, but that
doesn't mean there aren't humans involved in the process. As Bloomberg
reported earlier this year, the company employs thousands of people to
transcribe and annotate a portion of the voice recordings.
For anyone
skittish about what Alexa might record by accident, Amazon offered the
reassurance that it operates with a ”continuously overwritten” buffer that
processes all speech overheard prior to a wake word (usually “Alexa”)
triggering a recording.
Smart home
assistants might be smart, but they're not perfect. Amazon Echo owners have reported their
private conservations being erroneously recorded and sent off to someone on
their contacts list. Amazon chalks these incidents up as “unlikely” errors.
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