Executives may need to reconsider whether Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant is listening to more than just their commands. Or perhaps the telephone conference attendee who pauses to gather details from Alexa is giving the device more than just his or her own comments.
Privacy concerns over just how much information is received and stored by personal assistants are not new — but have now been quantified. An EU citizen, exercising his GDPR rights, asked Amazon for information on all his personal information held by the firm. What he received, two months later, was a link to a 100Mb zip file containing 1,700 Alexa audio files. He doesn’t own an Amazon Echo device and has never used the Alexa service; and it was not his voice that was recorded.
