While there’s an upside to having all these digital voice assistants at our beck and call, there are of course some privacy and security issues that we need to consider. Facebook and Google have been in the spotlight for some time now but there is also a concern about Amazon and the data from its smart assistant Alexa that it keeps on its servers. US Democrat Senator Chris Coons from Delaware recently sent a letter to the online retail giant asking for an explanation on its privacy practices. Amazon’s answer to it doesn’t really put users at ease.
Coons demanded an answer from Amazon on things like how long they kept voice recordings and transcripts and what they actually do with such data. According to a CNET article, this came about because of their recent report that claimed Amazon did not delete information even after a user deletes voice recordings made on Alexa. Brian Huseman, Amazon’s Vice President of public policy, says in their response letter that they keep these recordings “indefinitely” and will only remove them if it’s manually deleted by users.
And while they are making sure that the transcripts of the recordings do not remain in the other storage systems of Alexa, there are still some records they don’t delete even if the audio itself has been removed by the user. You can also conclude from their letter that they keep a record of almost all of your purchase transactions on Alexa, like using it to get a ride on Uber or having food delivered to your house.
The transcripts of reminders and alarms are also saved and Huseman says that customers would not want them to delete “the underlying data” that would prevent Alexa from performing the task expected of it. Amazon says the transcripts are used to train the smart assistant and of course it’s not anonymous as they are associated with every user’s account. This brings huge privacy issues, including the recent information that the “Remember” feature doesn’t get deleted until you call the customer service and delete your entire profile. The company said this was just a bug though and it has now been fixed.
Coons was not satisfied with the explanation, saying that we still need to know the extent to which the data kept is shared with third parties and how they use that data. We can probably expect some more follow up letters and explanations regarding this issue.
