Amazon employees listening to your Alexa recordings can also easily find customers’ home addresses, report claims
- Amazon employees who audit Alexa recordings can access users’ location data
- Workers can use longitude and latitude coordinates to find home addresses
- It’s unclear how many Amazon employees have access to this sensitive data
- The firm said access is ‘highly controlled’ and is meant to make Alexa better
Hot on the heels of Amazon admitting it can listen to private Alexa audio, a new report has revealed that employees can also access users’ home addresses.
An Amazon team charged with auditing Alexa users’ commands can see users’ latitude and longitude coordinates, allowing them to easily discover their addresses, Bloomberg reported, citing sources close to the situation.
It’s the same team uncovered by Bloomberg earlier this month, which is located all over the world and sifts through thousands of recordings, transcribing and analyzing them in the process.
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An Amazon team charged with auditing Alexa users’ commands can see their location coordinates, allowing them to easily discover their addresses, a new report has found
HOW TO TURN ALEXA SETTINGS OFF
Open the Alexa app on your phone.
Tap the menu button on the top-left of the screen.
Select ‘Alexa Account.’
Choose ‘Alexa Privacy.’
Select ‘Manage how your data improves Alexa.’
Turn the button next to ‘Help Develop New Features’ to off.
Turn off the button next to your name under ‘Use Messages to Improve Transcriptions.’
After obtaining users’ location data, they can enter it into third-party mapping services, such as Google Maps, to generate their home address, according to Bloomberg.
There’s no evidence of Amazon employees using the data to track individual users, but the very possibility raises concerns about the company giving its workers too much access to users’ data.
For example, if an employee auditing a users’ Alexa recordings obtains their address, it would be much easier for them to identify the device owner.
Amazon previously indicated that employees are unable to identify the person or account behind the recordings as part of their workflow and said information is ‘treated with high confidentiality,’ including multi-factor authentication, encryption and other means.
Amazon told Bloomberg in a statement that ‘access to tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions.
‘Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems.
‘We regularly audit employee access to internal tools and limit access whenever and wherever possible,’ the spokesperson added.
The company claims that collecting location data allows it to provide more precise and accurate answers to users’ queries.
It’s unclear if all the employees in the auditing team, known as Alexa Data Services, have access to users’ location data, Bloomberg noted.
Amazon has used an Echo device’s internet connection to ascertain its location, but has also used the shipping address associated with the device as its location.
Users have to enter a shipping address when setting up an Alexa account and must also agree to share location data as part of the registration process.
What’s more, a smaller subset of Amazon’s auditing employees can also see the home and work addresses, phone numbers, names and email addresses associated with the account when they set it up, Bloomberg said.
This allows Alexa to complete requests like those asking the voice assistant to ‘Text mom.’
Amazon has reportedly tightened its restrictions over what user data employees can access in recent months, with some actions being taken as recently as this month, following the previous Bloomberg report.
The earlier report detailed how staff members have access to user recordings, most of which are mundane or amusing.
If they do encounter a recording that’s distressing, it may be discussed in internal chat rooms, but it’s rarely reported to Amazon.
WHY ARE PEOPLE CONCERNED OVER PRIVACY WITH AMAZON’S ALEXA DEVICES?
Amazon devices have previously been activated when they’re not wanted – meaning the devices could be listening.
Millions are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that their conversations are being heard.
Amazon devices rely on microphones listening out for a key word, which can be triggered by accident and without their owner’s realisation.
The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a ‘smart alarm’, will also probably be facing directly at the user’s bed.
The device has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room – even if music is playing.
Last month a hack by British security researcher Mark Barnes saw 2015 and 2016 versions of the Echo turned into a live microphone.
Fraudsters could then use this live audio feed to collect sensitive information from the device.
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