IF YOU VALUE YOUR PRIVACY, NEVER BRING AN AMAZON ALEXA DEVICE INTO YOUR HOME
Mac Slavo
April 25th, 2019
SHTFplan.com
Privacy advocates are sounding alarms about Amazon’s Alexa device. A few weeks ago, the commands users were giving to their “smart devices” were being monitored by humans all in the name of “product empowerment.” But there is even worse news for those who cherish their privacy.
Amazon Alexa’s always-on microphone that so many Americans have willingly invited into their homes gives employees at Amazon enough information that they can “easily” discover any user’s home address, according to a report by Gizmodo. Their report comes from unnamed Amazon employees who talked with Bloomberg News about the distressing and privacy-violating situation.
Bloomberg made it clear that there haven’t been any reports of Amazon employees or contractors actually abusing this power and tracking down users at home, however, they did say that this backend feature gives employees “unnecessarily broad access to customer data.”
Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. –Bloomberg News
Amazon is not denying employees have access to customer data and the company is attempting to downplay the implications. “Access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions,” an Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo by email. And Amazon failed to declare just how many a “limited number of employees” that could be, and several media outlets have speculated that it could be thousands.
The Rest…HERE
