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A detailed look at how Amazon Alexa collects, stores, and uses your personal data.
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Terrible
Amazon Alexa's privacy score of 8/100 reflects their data collection practices, transparency, incident history, and user control options. This score indicates significant privacy concerns that users should be aware of.
The FTC fined Amazon $25 million in 2023 for retaining children's Alexa voice recordings and geolocation data indefinitely, even after parents requested deletion, violating COPPA.
In 2019, Bloomberg revealed that thousands of Amazon employees worldwide listened to and transcribed private Alexa recordings, including sensitive conversations, as part of a quality improvement program.
An Alexa user in 2018 discovered that their Echo device secretly recorded a private conversation and sent it to a random contact, which Amazon attributed to a 'misinterpretation' of background speech.
A 2020 study by Northeastern University found that Alexa devices were activated by background sounds and unrelated speech up to 19 times per day, recording and transmitting audio without the wake word being spoken.
In 2022, Amazon's Alexa division was reported to be losing $10 billion annually, raising concerns that the device was subsidized primarily for its data collection value rather than as a viable consumer product.
Amazon Alexa's data collection is deeply integrated into its functionality, making meaningful opt-out very difficult without eliminating the device. In the Alexa app, go to Settings > Alexa Privacy. Under 'Manage Your Alexa Data,' enable automatic deletion and choose the shortest period (3 months). Better yet, manually delete all voice recordings regularly by selecting 'Delete All Recordings for All History.' Disable 'Help improve Alexa' to prevent Amazon employees from listening to your recordings. Turn off 'Use messages to improve transcriptions.' Under 'Manage Your Alexa Data,' disable 'Help develop new features.' Go to 'Smart Home Device Usage Data' and disable sharing. Under 'Detected Sounds History,' delete all entries and disable this feature. Disable Drop-In entirely under Settings > Communications > Drop In, as this allows other Echo devices to listen in. Remove voice profiles for household members under Settings > Your Profile. Disable Alexa Guard and Alexa Hunches, which use the microphone to detect sounds and infer your habits. Review and remove all third-party Alexa Skills, as each skill can access different types of data. Disable purchasing through Alexa under Settings > Account > Voice Purchasing. Disable Alexa's Sidewalk feature under Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk. Use the physical mute button on your Echo device whenever you are not actively using it. This electronically disconnects the microphone and is the only reliable way to prevent listening. For genuine privacy, remove Alexa devices from your home entirely. Replace them with Mycroft, an open-source voice assistant that processes speech locally and does not send data to corporate servers. Alternatively, use Home Assistant's local voice control pipeline, which runs speech recognition entirely on your own hardware. If you have other Amazon smart home devices connected to Alexa, be aware that removing Alexa may require reconfiguring those devices.
Looking for a privacy-respecting alternative to Amazon Alexa? We recommend:
MycroftEnd-to-end encrypted messaging with zero metadata collection.
WeTalkin: End-to-end encrypted messaging with zero metadata collection. No ads. No data harvesting. Just private conversation.
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