Amazon Echo (Business Wire)
Alexa is like having your own personal assistant that never asks for a raise. The problem is she’s always listening – and so are thousands of Amazon workers, according to a report.
Teams stationed around the world listen to and transcribe recordings, then send them back into the Echo’s software to erase the gaps in Alexa’s ability to understand speech, a report from Bloomberg said.
AMAZON ALEXA ADDS DETAILED NEWS READING OPTION
Sometimes the workers can even hear chatter in the background while Alexa is on but employees on the team are not authorized to speak about their work, Bloomberg reported.
The employees, who range from contract to full-time, reportedly sign nondisclosure agreements and listen to up to 1,000 audio clips per nine-hour shift.
Although Amazon reportedly has procedures in place for when potential criminal conduct is heard. Two workers in Romania told Bloomberg that they were told it isn’t Amazon’s job to interfere. In other cases, the workers said they sometimes use internal chatrooms to share recordings they find amusing.
When workers come across a background conversation about personal information like bank details the worker is supposed to make the audio file as “critical data” and move on, according to Bloomberg.
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg in a written 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.
Amazon did not immediately respond to an email from Fox News.
Alexa users can disable their voice recordings for developing new features.
Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant also have human workers that listen to snippets of audio, but the companies reported to Bloomberg that the recordings aren't linked to personally identifying information.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
“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,” Amazon told Bloomberg.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/thousands-of-amazon-workers-listening-to-alexa-recordings-hear-personal-information-even-potential-crimes-report
2019-04-11 07:37:58Z
52780265665567
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Thousands of Amazon workers listen to recordings from Alexa: reports - Fox News"
Post a Comment