Amazon has admitted it employs temporary workers, sometimes working from
home, to transcribe the voice commands of its Alexa virtual assistant.
The acknowledgment follows revelations by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper
that workers hired by an agency in Poland were allowed to hear the
voice recordings of its German users.Voice Prompts Devices
The disclosure heightens privacy concerns amid the growing popularity
of interactive devices that allow users to give voice instructions to
make their gadget play music, turn on lights or check the news and
weather.Previous revelations have shown how the voice assistants can be
triggered unintentionally to record conversations.
Last week, Britain's Guardian reported that contractors working on
Apple's virtual assistant, Siri, had heard more than just users'
instructions, having listened in to events including people making drug
deals and having sex.
Welt’s article, meanwhile, revealed how the voice commands given by
Alexa's German users are not only heard by Amazon employers but also by
agency workers in Poland.
The newspaper reported that contractors, recruited by the agency
Randstad, were allowed to work from home or on the road, a practice that
potentially opens up users' personal information to be copied or shared
without scrutiny.Welt said that while the tech giant had insisted that
only trusted staff had access to the recordings, job advertisements by
the agency offered workers with strong German language skills the
promise of "teleworking throughout the country," after being trained by
Amazon at their Gdansk office.
Amazon admitted that audio transcription can be carried out at home but
insisted "there are strict security measures and policies that every
employee must adhere to." For example, working in public places is
prohibited, it said.
One agency worker told Welt it was possible to hear names or places in
the voice recordings, which could potentially allow Alexa users to be
identified.On Saturday, Amazon announced a new global privacy feature
allowing users to explicitly block their voice commands from being
reviewed by humans.
Apple and Google also recently suspended human audits of voice assistant recordings following similar concerns.
German and US regulators have begun investigations into the possible violation of privacy by the tech giants.
Although recent cases may give consumers the impression that someone is
“listening" to their conversations, it is rarely true. Only a tiny
proportion of the voice recordings are ever replayed by the tech giants,
who insist the monitoring is only done to improve services.
