A Team at Amazon Is Listening to Recordings Captured by Alexa

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-employees-listening-to-alexa-echo-recordings

by howard941 • 7 years ago

72 32 7 years ago

buzzfeednews.com

headalgorithm• 7 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513 for more discussion on this and the original Bloomberg article

Deinos• 7 years ago

Large discussion already occurring:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513

nerdjon• 7 years ago

With the exception of the fact that this is going to sell clicks... Is this really news? I thought they confirmed this years ago? Same with Google and Apple...

zachr3• 7 years ago

Am I supposed to be surprised? This is just logical. Of course they employ people to grade the quality of assistants' voice recognition and responses.

minikites• 7 years ago

Does that excuse Amazon's behavior? None of us were surprised when we learned about the NSA's Echelon or PRISM programs after all.

SlowRobotAhead4• 7 years ago

I would NEVER put an Alexa in my home - but has Amazon done anything wrong here?

You agreed to the terms of use, they’re doing expected work to anyone that has any idea how this all works, there seems to be no malicious intent even implied. IDK, if you don’t want someone potentially listening you, don’t put an Echo in your home.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Nobody should be surprised by this. To actually test your voice recognition software in a definitive manner you need to compare you kind of have to compare your software's analysis to human analysis and that requires humans to listen to the audio or at least snippets of it. The software is competing with a human after all, you need to test its performance compared to the humans.

shanehoban• 7 years ago

Is this newsworthy?

I know people who work at Apple. Their job is to listen to recordings taken by Siri, regardless of what the intention is. E.g. they listen to text messages people say to Siri - to send, searches, anything said to Siri.

SlowRobotAhead4• 7 years ago

I think it’s newsworthy to remind normal people that technology isn’t magic. In the case of always on microphones in your home, that is important imo.

maxxxxx2• 7 years ago

We really have to go back to a model where most computation is done on the client and data mainly goes from server to client and not the other way. They shouldn’t be using real conversations for training their models or at least only in a very limited and open manner. Soon these companies will see everything we do, hear everything we say and read everything we write. That’s not a good future.

furst• 7 years ago

There are actually a few projects that follow this model much closer than Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant, or at the very least let you control host the computation on your desktop so you know where all your traffic is going.

https://mycroft.ai/ https://snips.ai/

saiya-jin• 7 years ago

Soon these companies will see everything we do, hear everything we say and read everything we write.

Seriously, in 2019, you are actually surprised this is happening? After all the news that keeps popping out, proving that almost every single effin' company out there is after as much client data as possible, regardless of morals and sometimes even laws? People actually pay for devices that keep monitoring them, hilarious (and sad tbh). To save few clicks and feel 'modern'?

I fail to see the proper added value in ones life of all these assistants, not in the light of all the technical f_ckups that shouldn't have happened by simple design decisions.

maxxxxx2• 7 years ago

I am not really surprised as such but I am worried that my worst suspicions seem to always come true. If that trend continues then our future will be very bleak and very suppressive.

wybiral3• 7 years ago

There's a team of people at Mozilla working on adding an offline speech recognition API [1] to Firefox. This is particularly exciting to me because I have a SpeechRecognition-based "assistant" framework that I would love to make 100% locally served.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1248897

tracer4201• 7 years ago

Buzz Feed of all sources for something just about everyone knows. What’s the goal other than driving clicks and trying to stir up pointless outrage?

hbosch• 7 years ago

Buzzfeed cites Bloomberg as the source in this article.

dekhn• 7 years ago

I think this sort of process, assuming the privacy and security teams have their say, is an absolutely legitimate part of product improvement.

pxtail• 7 years ago

I'm wondering if they are recording some fun conversations or maybe telling family/friends: "hahahah, hey Mike, you wouldn't believe what this weirdo said to Alexa... and he lives there ..., yep there ... just three blocks away, I know because he ordered toilet paper just after that..."

Causality1• 7 years ago

The smart solution would've been for Amazon to make it an opt-in program and offer people a dollar credit for some servic they'll never use in exchange for signing up. Amazon would've had millions of users consenting to any amount of data collection and be free and clear in the press.

joshuaheard• 7 years ago

I am fine with this, if the purpose is solely for product development. I have a problem with the data not being anonymous and their mocking some of the clips in a shared internal forum. The data should be anonymized and management should stop the mocking of clips on internal forums.

A Team at Amazon Is Listening to Recordings Captured by Alexa

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