Amazon Alexa owners should avoid putting their devices in the bedroom or bathroom because they risk having private conversations recorded, a cyber expert has warned. Kurt Knutsson noted Alexa is designed to answer queries at the drop of a hat – and that means the device is constantly recording to guarantee a top-rate performance. The cyber tech expert said the “disturbing” feature could see Amazon staff unwittingly listen in to conversations in their research efforts – unless users select a privacy feature.
Cyber expert Kurt Knutsson advised
He said: “Do you know the disturbing reason you should never keep Amazon Alexa in certain rooms of the house?
“If you keep your Alexa in your bedroom or your bathroom, you might want to think again about putting it in less private places.
“While you can technically put your Alexa anywhere, your device is always recording you.
“That is how the device is able to respond anytime you say the magic word so keeping the device in those intimate parts of your home might not be the most wise decision.”
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Mr Knutsson added: “Amazon confirmed their staff listen to the conversation recorded on Alexa for research purposes, reviewing up to 1000 audio clips per day.”
But the cyber expert noted privacy concerns could be easily resolved by changing the settings on your device.
He continued: “And if you don’t want Amazon recording you, you can adjust your Alexa setting so your device is not saving your daily conversation.
“Open the Alexa app on your smartphone, tap ‘more’ on the bottom right and tap ‘settings’, then tap ‘Alexa privacy’ and click ‘manage your Alexa data’.
A spokesman for Amazon said at the time: “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.”
He added: “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.
“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.”
