Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa (bloomberg.com)

Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people around the world to help improve its Alexa digital assistant. "The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices," reports Bloomberg. "The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands." From the report: The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon's Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital's up-and-coming Pipera district. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon's presence. The work is mostly mundane. One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as "Taylor Swift" and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word -- or come across an amusing recording.

Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn't Amazon's job to interfere. [...] Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn't explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. "We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems," the company says in a list of frequently asked questions. In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don't provide a user's full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user's first name and the device's serial number. An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg: "We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone."

They added: "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 the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it."

Further reading: How To Stop Amazon From Listening To Your Recordings

Comments

Wait, you DIDN'T think that was happening?

[SuperKendall]

The article seems to present this as some new info, I assumed this was happening all the time, otherwise how else can Alexa improve?

it's incidentally also why I don't have anything like Alexa or other voice assistants in my house, but if you are sending audio to Amazon hey guess what, something or someone is going to listen to that audio. DURRRR.

Re:Wait, you DIDN'T think that was happening?

[postbigbang]

No, no one should be suprised-- but they will be. Alexa isn't the only one, just the one currently exposed. How does one improve Alexa? Certainly training.

Or, recycling it.

Humanity has long desired servants. The servants are controlled by their masters, who are not you.

Re:Wait, you DIDN'T think that was happening?

[gweihir]

This is a standard tactic: First lie directly, then less directly, then admit a bit, then admit the whole. The average person is stupid and will only see the small steps, not the large overall one and will accept the whole thing. Works time and again.

Get rid of your tracker too.

[jbn-o]

If you're like a lot of people, you already have a cell phone (more properly known as a tracker because that's what it does most of the time) so you already have the same spying capability in your house, on your person, and you likely choose to carry that around with you everywhere you go. Even technical users don't expect that the portable spy devices are listening whenever the proprietor wishes (and there's no indicator to tell the user when the mic is hot). You shouldn't own a tracker either.

Interesting

[93 Escort Wagon]

So how many times, when we’ve discussed these devices before and someone like me has brought up this EXACT concern... has someone right here said some variant of “oh, no, they don’t transmit anything unless it’s preceded by the trigger phrase”?

Re:Interesting

[gweihir]

While I agree on the problem, the solution is not going to work as most people (and most children) are stupid. Just look at the decisions they make. They know that politicians are lying, yet they still vote for the one that tells the better lies. They know corporations are just after money, yet they believe the ads. They vote against their own freedom, against their economic well-being and against their future. They are driven by fear, greed, hate and arrogance, and rationality makes only very rare appearances, if at all. And the "leaders" are cut from the same cloth.

I am sorry to say this, but this installment of the human race is fucked, and it is doing all the fucking to itself. Sure, there is a minority (may 10-15%) that actually understands how things work, that can think independently, that can verify facts and that can recognize a thing for what it is. But these are far too few. It is almost as if this planet is a failed experiment as to whether this mix of independent thinkers and others works and I think we can safely say it works badly and no way to fix it that can actually be implemented is known.

Re:Interesting

[skaralic]

While I agree on the problem, the solution is not going to work as most people (and most children) are stupid. Just look at the decisions they make. They know that politicians are lying, yet they still vote for the one that tells the better lies. They know corporations are just after money, yet they believe the ads. They vote against their own freedom, against their economic well-being and against their future. They are driven by fear, greed, hate and arrogance, and rationality makes only very rare appearances, if at all. And the "leaders" are cut from the same cloth.

I am sorry to say this, but this installment of the human race is fucked, and it is doing all the fucking to itself. Sure, there is a minority (may 10-15%) that actually understands how things work, that can think independently, that can verify facts and that can recognize a thing for what it is. But these are far too few. It is almost as if this planet is a failed experiment as to whether this mix of independent thinkers and others works and I think we can safely say it works badly and no way to fix it that can actually be implemented is known.

Relax. The world is complicated. Progress is not a straight line. People are free to make their own decisions, your understanding is not required. On the whole, we are doing amazingly well. The "challenges" of today are nothing compared to what we faced in the past. Nothing.

Get some perspective.

Re:If you care that much, poison the well

[gweihir]

Be on a blacklist that makes this ineffective within 15 minutes. The ones running this operation may have absolutely no ethics, but they are not terminally stupid.

Re:No you don't

[hawguy]

You only have this surveillance if you gave Google access to the mic permission.

I suggest you go into your phone and access permissions, microphone and turn off everything but the camera app and phone apps.

The big problem with Android is you cannot deny apps NETWORK access, so I'd like to stop the phone and camera apps accessing networks.

You have a lot of faith that the creator of the operating system didn't give themselves a back-door way to enable the microphone anytime they like, regardless of what you've set the permissions to.

While I feel pretty confident that when I deny a random app's access to the microphone, that app really can't access it, but I have less confidence Google themselves can't turn on the mic anytime they want.