You might remember this story about Amazon employees having access to what you say to your Amazon Alexa. Well, this story has just taken a bit of a creepy turn. Bloomberg is now reporting the following:
An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.
The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa.
And:
Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.
Well that’s delightful. Actually it’s not. And even though this information doesn’t appear to have been used for anything nefarious, the fact that this team has access to this data is problematic if you’re the privacy minded sort.
Now if you’re the least bit bothered by this…. And you should be bothered by this… Amazon has this handy page that will allow you to tweak your privacy settings so that you only allow Amazon to hear and see the information that you want them to see. I would suggest that all Alexa owners give this page a read and act accordingly.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
This entry was posted on April 24, 2019 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Amazon Employees Not Only Listen To What You Say To Alexa, They Know Where you Live Too
You might remember this story about Amazon employees having access to what you say to your Amazon Alexa. Well, this story has just taken a bit of a creepy turn. Bloomberg is now reporting the following:
An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.
The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa.
And:
Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.
Well that’s delightful. Actually it’s not. And even though this information doesn’t appear to have been used for anything nefarious, the fact that this team has access to this data is problematic if you’re the privacy minded sort.
Now if you’re the least bit bothered by this…. And you should be bothered by this… Amazon has this handy page that will allow you to tweak your privacy settings so that you only allow Amazon to hear and see the information that you want them to see. I would suggest that all Alexa owners give this page a read and act accordingly.
Share this:
Like this:
Related
This entry was posted on April 24, 2019 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.