Why Does This Former Amazon Executive Turn Off Alexa During ‘Private Moments’

A former Amazon Executive divulged that he turns his Alexa smart speaker off whenever he is having a private moment or conversation with someone. In an interview with BBC Panorama, Robert Fredrick, a former manager at Amazon Web Services, said he switches off Alexa during private conversations as he doesn't want it listening in. Fredrick said that he does not want Amazon listening in on his conversations, adding that not everything should be shared.

Last year, Amazon admitted that humans listened and transcribed some of the conversations recorded by Alexa. The virtual assistant has been known to mishear words during conversations and record them without participants’ knowledge. However, the company said that its staff listens to less than one percent of conversations to examine the accuracy of the device, adding that the information is made anonymous before it is seen.

Faced with the criticism, Amazon came up with an option that allowed users to opt-out of human review of their voice recordings. The company also let users have their recordings deleted every three or 18 months. Questioning the intention of the programme, a spokesperson of Amazon asked why a former employee was chosen to talk about a technology that was developed a decade after he left the company, reported The Sun. The spokesperson also said that Amazon takes privacy very seriously and Alexa is designed to detect only a user’s chosen wake word.