Amazon has revealed that user's voice recordings from its Alexa smart assistant are stored indefinitely by default. In response to a query from US Democrat Senator Uber, the company confirmed that transcripts are also stored permanently unless a user manually deletes them. Notably, the information is not anonymised but linked to customer accounts, although Amazon stated that efforts are being made to ensure that the data is not kept in any other Alexa storage systems. These recordings are often used to train human employees and natural language processing systems, while transcripts are sometimes used as digital proofs of purchase.
Amazon has revealed that user's voice recordings from its Alexa smart assistant are stored indefinitely by default. In response to a query from US Democrat Senator Chris Coons, the company confirmed that transcripts are also stored permanently unless a user manually deletes them. Notably, the information is not anonymised but linked to customer accounts, although Amazon stated that efforts are being made to ensure that the data is not kept in any other Alexa storage systems. These recordings are often used to train human employees and natural language processing systems, while transcripts are sometimes used as digital proofs of purchase.