Amazon Alexa: Surveillance Profile

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.