Amazon lets Alexa recordings evaluate by timeworkers in home-office

According to a report by German newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, Amazon has Alexa’s voice recordings listened to not only by its own employees, but also by Polish temporary workers.

For some time now, Amazon has been the subject of criticism because the recordings of the Alexa language assistant are listened to and typed in by employees in order to improve speech recognition. For a long time, however, the users were unaware of this long-standing practice.

It has now become known that temporary workers in the home office listen to and evaluate the recordings using a remote work program. Until recently, a Polish recruitment agency advertised “teleworking all over the country”, although Amazon had previously assured that the voice recordings would only be evaluated in specially protected offices. However, one of the Polish temporary workers stated that many of them would work from home and that among the records were personal data such as names or places that allowed conclusions to be drawn about the person.

Upon request, Amazon confirmed the research results. A spokesman said that some employees were allowed to work from other locations than the Amazon offices, but that particularly strict rules would have to be observed. In particular, working in public places is not allowed.

On the same day, the online job advertisements were deleted and Amazon offered a new data protection option. Users can now explicitly object and block their recording for post-processing by Amazon employees.

Other language assistants have also been or are to be suspended from language evaluation, at least for European users. According to Google, around 0.2 % of the recordings are listened to subsequently, while Apple and Amazon say it is less than 1 %. Google already deactivated the function three months ago and Apple also wants to suspend the evaluation and explicitly ask its users later whether an evaluation may be resumed.