Following a report from earlier this year that revealed that Amazon has thousands of human workers listening to Alexa requests to improve the assistant, Amazon is now rolling out an option to exclude your recordings from these reviews.
Amazon Alexa users can now opt out of having their requests reviewed by humans. "We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures," an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear."
To have your requests excluded from review, launch the Alexa app on your phone, open the hamburger menu, and then select Settings > Alexa Privacy > Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa. You can then toggle off the setting "Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features".
"Training Alexa with recordings from a diverse range of customers helps ensure Alexa works well for everyone," Amazon explains in the Alexa app. "With this setting on, your voice recordings may be used to develop new features and manually reviewed to help improve our services. Only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed."
Amazon also warns that if you exclude your requests from review, "voice recognition and new features may not work well for you."
Amazon caught flak earlier this year when it was reported that not only were there human workers analyzing and transcribing Alexa users' requests, but that some of these employees had access to users' geographic coordinates. While Amazon said that access to its internal tools is "highly controlled" and "only granted to a limited number of employees," some people still felt uneasy that their voice recordings may have been analyzed and their location unknowingly revealed. Fast-forward a few months and Amazon is now letting Alexa users opt out of having their recordings analyzed, which is a welcome change.