Earlier this year, it was reported that Amazon has thousands of employees listening to conversations that users have with the company’s voice assistant Alexa. As it turns out, some of those employees may have access to more than just audio recordings. Some members of Amazon’s Alexa auditing team have access to location data, including the latitude and longitude of users, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The latest report presents potential privacy concerns regarding Amazon’s access to user data. According to the report, the location information provided to employees could be used to track down a person’s home address with relative ease. That could lead to more revealing data, including social media profiles and other information should the employee be inclined to dig into a person’s life. Bloomberg notes that there is no indication that coordinates have been used to pinpoint an individual user, but it’s worth questioning whether the information needs to be provided to people auditing Alexa conversations.
Because employees have access to voice recordings, they could theoretically pair the conversations that people are having with their voice assistant to other information that could be obtained by following the trail of their location data. A previous report about employees listening to Alexa conversations revealed that they sometimes hear what sounds like criminal behavior or other potentially personal activity. The ability to put a name and face to those types of recordings, which users may not be aware are being listened to by humans in the first place, could lead to invasions of privacy.
In a new statement provided to Bloomberg, Amazon said “access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions. Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems. We regularly audit employee access to internal tools and limit access whenever and wherever possible.”
According to Amazon, it records location data so Alexa can more accurately answer questions and handle requests that require location-specific context, like the weather in a given city or local business recommendations.
Few things ruin a quiet evening faster than a robot vacuum roaring through the living room. Most of us end up pausing the cleaning run, which defeats the whole purpose of owning one. Matic thinks it has the answer with its new Serene robot vacuum, and the big selling point is how little noise it makes.
The Matic Serene runs at 52 decibels even when cleaning at full power. To put that in perspective, Matic compares it to the hum of your refrigerator. It is available now for $1,695, which is $200 more than the original Matic’s current price.
Outdoor security cameras are not always practical if you live in an apartment or rental. Drilling into an exterior wall may be off-limits, while pointing a regular indoor camera through a window can create another problem once reflections start showing up after dark.
Baseus is trying to solve both issues with the new PrimeSentinel W1, a $69.99 security camera designed specifically to monitor the outdoors through glass. It mounts directly to a window without drilling and uses a 4K Starlight sensor with an F1.0 aperture for full-color monitoring during the day and at night.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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