According to the report, thousands of Amazon workers are listening to the conversations that Alexa devices are having with their owners.
The workers are primarily based in Amazon facilities in Boston, Costa Rica, India, and Romania. The workers spend nine hours each day sifting through various conversations to ensure that Alexa understands what users are saying.
According to the report, these workers are hearing more than just the users Alexa prompts. Workers reported that they heard one user singing in the shower and a child screaming for help.
The work is mostly mundane. One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word—or come across an amusing recording.Two workers claim that they heard what they believed was an ongoing sexual assault. The workers were told by Amazon management that it wasn’t their role to violate the privacy of their customers.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson claimed that the company only reviews a small portion of Alexa conversations. “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” the Amazon spokesman said in the statement. “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-10/global-
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/tech/amazon-alexa-listening/index.html
https://www.techspot.com/news/79610-thousands-
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