In a series of questions coming from Senator Chris Coons, Amazon offered some interesting and unexpected answers. Senator Coons and others in Congress had a few pointed questions for Amazon about the safeguards that the company employs when saving transcripts and voice data. Amazon’s answers come on the heels of a letter that Senator Coons sent to the tech giant back in May.
In essence, Senator Coons had questions about Amazon’s take on privacy with Alexa as well as the commercial applications that these transcripts are put towards. Amazon apparently keeps voice recordings indefinitely after users have deleted them from their Alexa devices, which is something that customers might have wished to know before they created the voice recording in the first place. This practice from Amazon came to light last week week on June 28th, which is very close to the June 30th deadline set by Senator Coons way back in May.
Senator Coons calls for greater transparency apparently arise from concerns about privacy, civil liberties, and consumer rights. Senator Coons said that consumers have a right to know how their personal information is being employed by tech companies to make even more money. The senator said that he would work tirelessly to “protect Americans’ personal information.” Amazon seemed reluctant to go beyond the details provided in the response letter to Senator Coons since it laconically invited reporters looking for a follow-up to refer back to the letter.
According to Tech Crunch, a spokesperson for Amazon said in the June 28th letter that “customers would not want or expect” the deletion of voice recordings to trigger a deletion of the data from Amazon or hamper the effectiveness of Alexa. Actually, consumers might well expect a deletion of a voice recording to be in some way connected to deletion of the underlying data as evidenced by the fact that many consumers are shocked that Amazon doesn’t delete the underlying data when it purportedly deletes the voice recording from the device.
Customers must laboriously contact Amazon’s customer service and have their entire profile deleted in order to scrub the data. In fact, Amazon Alexa’s Remember feature doesn’t delete stored information unless customers make the call to Amazon’s customer service for the request. Unfortunately, many customers have assumed that their data isn’t retained indefinitely or that there’s any need to make such a call. Privacy advocacy groups and civil libertarians see more trouble for Amazon ahead.
Dil Bole Oberoi
