After a Guardian story revealed that Apple uses human contractors to review some of its Siri recordings this week, Apple made the decision to temporarily suspend the program. Google followed suit with its virtual assistant, and now Amazon has done the same for Alexa—except instead of ditching the human review it’s just added the option to expressly opt-out of it.
Previously you were able to set Alexa’s permissions so that your recordings would not be used to help develop new device features. While that move also technically took your recordings out for manual review, that was never spelled out in the settings.
Now you can opt-out by going into Settings, followed by Alexa Privacy, and then “Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa.”
If you want out, you’ll want to toggle things off where it says “With this setting on, your voice recordings may be used to develop new features and manually reviewed to help improve our services. Only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed.”
Still, if you don’t want your recordings to be manually reviewed, then make sure you have that option toggled off.
