Amazon employees not only listen to your private conversations captured by Alexa; they also know your home address
by: Ethan Huff
NaturalNews.com
Wednesday, May 01, 2019
Not long after it was confirmed that Amazon employees have been secretly listening to the user commands given to its artificial intelligence (AI) “Alexa” devices, without the knowledge or permission of these users, new reports have come out to show that Amazon employees are also abusing Alexa users’ location data, giving themselves illicit access to customers’ home addresses.
At least five supposedly former Amazon employees recently came forward as whistleblowers to admit that Amazon maintains a covert “Alexa team” of employees, the job of whom is to transcribe, annotate, and analyze the voice recordings captured by Alexa spy devices. This Alexa team is reportedly comprised of employees spanning three different continents.
Since Alexa apparently doesn’t always understand what users are saying or implying, the purpose of this Alexa team is “to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands,” these five individuals claim. But along with this comes secret access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates, which can easily be plugged into third-party mapping software to identify people’s locations.
Amazon had never intended for the truth about this secret spying program to become public, as the company forced employees who knew about it to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from discussing it publicly. But they were apparently comfortable speaking anonymously and off the record to Bloomberg, which was the first to blow the lid on it.
“Anytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don’t want to be found,” says Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law‘s Communications and Technology Clinic.
According to Barrett, location data is far more sensitive than most other categories of user information. And the fact that it can potentially be retrieved alongside Alexa user recordings sets up “a big red flag” for Barrett, especially since Amazon has already been caught lying about its technology’s spying capabilities.
For more related news, be sure to check out Surveillance.news.
Just prior to this spying program being exposed, Amazon lied in an official statement, claiming its employees do not have “direct access” to Alexa users’ location data
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