Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa

'Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people around the world to
help improve its Alexa digital assistant. "The team listens to voice
recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices," reports
Bloomberg. "The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed
back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in
Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to
commands." From the report:

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. 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 modern facility
stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior
sign advertising Amazon's presence. The work is mostly mundane. 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. 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. The
teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help
parsing a muddled word -- or come across an amusing recording.

Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly
criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was
a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the
experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress.
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. [...] Amazon, in its marketing and privacy
policy materials, doesn't explicitly say humans are listening to
recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. "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. In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the
option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the
development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows
that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors 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. An
Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg: "We take the
security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously.
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."

They added: "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."'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/2340251

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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