Amazon staff listen to Alexa recordings and put them in chat rooms.

Amazon listens in to what users say to their Alexa voice assistants, it has emerged.

Teams around the world use recordings from Amazon Echo smart speakers to improve how Alexa responds to requests, Bloomberg reported.

The website claimed that Amazon staff have occasionally heard "distressing" recordings - with some workers even sharing funny audio clips in internal chat rooms.

In a statement, the online retail giant confirmed that recordings were used to enhance Alexa's ability to understand human language and speech patterns.

An Amazon spokeswoman added: "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," said a spokeswoman.

"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."

https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-echos-alexa-recordings-listened-to-by-staff-11690794

More Information can be found here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/amazon-alexa-echo-listening-spy-security-a8865056.html

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/11/amazon-staff-listen-to-customers-alexa-recordings-report-says