Smart speakers become eavesdropping devices? Amazon is exposed to eavesdropping on users' private lives through Alexa

　　In the development of smart speakers, participants need to use massive amounts of audio content to train algorithm models. However, audio recorded in a recording studio is difficult to meet the needs of models with high robustness requirements. Perhaps for this reason, Amazon Alexa developers are required to use Alexa devices to "eavesdrop" on users' conversations with them, store the audio, and hand it over to annotators around the world to help with conversational experiences on specific topics.

　　The Alexa voice system covers smart speaker products such as Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Spot.

　　Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people around the world to improve Alexa's language system, with one report saying: "Research teams listen to recordings made by Echo users in their homes and offices." "These recordings are transcribed, annotated, and fed back into the software, which is intended to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human language and help it better respond to commands."

　　The team, made up of third-party contractors and some full-time Amazon employees, works in locations including Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania and has signed nondisclosure agreements prohibiting it from speaking publicly about the project. They work nine-hour days and each person is required to analyze 1,000 audio clips a day, the people said.

　　The project is based at an office in Romania’s capital, with no external signs indicating Amazon’s presence. The work is mostly straightforward. One worker in Boston said he mines accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotates them to indicate that the searcher is looking for content related to the musical artist Taylor.

　　Sometimes they hear disturbing recordings or even sounds from a crime scene. Two workers said they thought they had found audio from a sexual assault, and when similar audio was processed, they sometimes shared it in the "group" to relieve stress. Amazon said it has procedures to follow when employees hear something unpleasant, but two Romanian workers said they were told by Amazon that they had no right to interfere when they asked for such cases to be handled.

　　So here comes the question: What would the monitoring department employees think if they heard unexpected sounds such as children crying for help, domestic violence, and crimes from Alexa? Would they react immediately and call the police? Or would they sit back and do nothing as Amazon requested?

　　An Amazon spokesperson responded to the statement, saying: "Amazon takes the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously. To improve the customer experience, we only annotate a small portion of Alexa's voice samples. This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems so Alexa can better understand users' requests."

　　They added: “We have strict technical and operational safeguards in place and a zero-tolerance policy for abuse of our systems. Employees do not have direct access to personal or account identifying information as part of this workflow. All information is kept highly confidential and we protect it using multi-factor authentication to limit access, service encryption and audits of our control environment.”

　　This plot seems to have been played out before: the report of Chinese microchips stealing data. The Amazon Alexa eavesdropping "case" was also reported by the American media "Bloomberg", and the former was exposed as fake news. Therefore, we still need to wait for further verification of the authenticity of this report.

　　Amazon CEO Bezos has not yet responded to this incident.