The Intercept reported earlier this year that employees of Amazon-owned Ring manually identify vehicles and people in videos captured by the company’s doorbell cameras, an effort to better train the software to do that work itself.
#AMAZON FIRE SPEECH RECORDER SERIAL#
A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa reviewers don’t provide a user’s full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number. The company says people who opt out of that program might still have their recordings analyzed by hand over the regular course of the review process. In Alexa’s privacy settings, Amazon gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions. 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.”Īmazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn’t explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. “We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. 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 only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order improve the customer experience. “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman said in an emailed statement. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word-or come across an amusing recording. 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.
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. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon’s presence. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon’s Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital’s up-and-coming Pipera district. The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.
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