Amazon will now let Alexa users decide if they want the company to listen in on their conversations for testing purposes (AMZN)

Rick Wilking/Reuters

If Alexa users don’t want Amazon to listen in on their conversations as a part of its human review process, there’s now an option for them to opt out, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday.
Bloomberg reports that the change went live on Friday, allowing users within the settings menu of Alexa’s smartphone app to block their audio snippets from potentially being analyzed by Amazon employees and contractors.
Amazon’s decision to give users control over their audio data comes as competitors like Apple and Google have temporarily halted their language review programs this week amid increased scrutiny and privacy concerns.
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If Alexa users don’t want Amazon to listen in on their conversations as a part of its manual review process, there’s now an option for them to opt-out, according to a Friday Bloomberg report.

Amazon’s decision to give users control over their audio data comes as competitors like Apple and Google have temporarily halted their language review programs this week amid increased scrutiny and privacy concerns.

Bloomberg reports that the change went live on Friday, allowing users within the settings menu of Alexa’s smartphone app to block their audio snippets from potentially being analyzed by Amazon employees and contractors. In April, Bloomberg first reported that Amazon had thousands of workers around the world listening and transcribing voice recordings from users in an effort to improve its software.

Apple and Google both have similar programs.

"We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures," an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider on Friday. "For Alexa, we already offer customers the ability to opt-out of having their voice recordings used to help develop new Alexa features. The voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests."

Bloomberg said that human review process was not previously mentioned within Alexa’s terms and conditions, but now, that’s been updated.

This week, Apple announced that it temporarily suspended its human review program for Siri, after a recent Guardian report revealed that contractors regularly heard private and confidential information. On Friday, Google confirmed with Business Insider that it had also halted its language review program globally, while the tech giant investigated a recent leak of audio information to a Dutch media outlet.

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