Thousands of Amazon employees listening to Alexa questions, report says

Amazon has thousands of employees listening to recordings of your Alexa questions and requests, according to a Bloomberg report.

The company calls it "data annotation," and it's apparently used to improve Alexa's understanding, over time.

Amazon says "annotators" only listen to a small sample of recordings in order to improve customer experience and the company has zero tolerance for abuse.

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Apple, Google, and Facebook also make use of this technique, according to Bloomberg.

This has been used to help law enforcement in cases of sexual assault and other crimes.

A spokesperson with Amazon released the following statement:

"We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers 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. We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. While all information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it, customers can delete their voice recordings associated with their account at any time."

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