Amazon will let you opt for human review of recordings …

First Google, then Apple, and now Amazon – all three bow to pressure from the EU on the issue of humans reviewing the recordings of their respective digital assistants. While Apple and Google paused the human review, Amazon decided to offer clearer and more comprehensive opt-out settings for Alexa users.

Amazon already offered a much clearer set of privacy policies than Google or Apple, having created a privacy portal after the latest round of scandals over Alexa voice recordings that revealed more than previously believed. That portal now has updated language on what it will do to check certain boxes.

Specifically, you can go to your Amazon Alexa app and navigate to your settings, then “Alexa Privacy” and finally “Manage how your data improves Alexa,” and find a new language on that page that now specifically says that “your voice recordings can be used to develop new functions and manually checked to help improve our services ”(emphasis ours).

You can also find that page through your web browser, here: https://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings.



Amazon’s new language now specifies that your voice could be “manually checked” if you don’t disable this feature.

Bloomberg reported the change for the first time today. An Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement:

We take customer privacy seriously and continually review our practices and procedures. For Alexa, we already offer customers the ability to opt out of having their voice recordings used to help develop new Alexa features. Voice recordings of customers using this opt-out option are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests. We will also update the information we provide to clients to make our practices clearer.

That clarity is much needed, as the above language made it appear that unchecking a box would disable the uploading of your voice recordings, that is not the case as they are still uploaded to Amazon’s servers. The only change is that while the old setting only excluded users from having their expressions reviewed “to help develop new features”, the new setting means that they will not be reviewed by humans, period.

In essence, Amazon has updated their settings and the language around them to actually do what it would have assumed they would have done in the first place.

Amazon offers a tool to allow users to delete their voice recordings whenever they want, but even with this new setting, Amazon will still store recordings of their voice by default. If you want to remove them, you will need to periodically go to the Alexa settings and do it yourself.

Apple has stopped human review of statements around the world, Google has stopped it in the EU, and Amazon is simply offering this clearer opt-out option. The three companies have a different approach to handling this growing concern for human reviewers, and hopefully all three will end up in the same place: clearer disclosures, transparent options for managing data, and the ability to not have your voice automatically stored. if you don’t want it to be.