Amazon Echo devices will send everything you say to the cloud

Amazon has announced that all voice recordings captured by Echo devices will be sent to the cloud, eliminating the option to process them locally.

In an email to users with the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting enabled on their Echo speakers and displays, the tech giant said it would stop supporting the feature on March 28, 2025.

“As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature,” said Amazon in the email.

The email also warned that Amazon would automatically update users’ settings to ‘Don’t Save Recordings’ on March 28 if they don’t manually change them before then. Amazon also said that if the setting is kept to that option, Voice ID and other personalized features will not work.

The ‘Don’t Save Recordings’ option meant that after the recordings are processed through the cloud, they are deleted alongside other previously saved files.

This discontinuation comes as Amazon is rolling out its all-new voice-controlled AI assistant, Alexa+. The most likely reason for this change is to help further train Alexa+ and expand its capabilities by using these recordings to test different scenarios.

However, Amazon has been in trouble for privacy reasons plenty of times, and this time won’t be the last. Notably, Amazon and other tech giants, like Apple and Google, were all embroiled in privacy scandals over voice recordings collected from smart speakers in 2019. The scandals all involved employees being able to access and listen to recordings captured by voice assistants like Alexa.

Most recently, in 2023, the tech giant agreed to pay US$25 million (about C$35.71 million) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over children’s privacy concerns after it failed to delete geolocation data and keep the voice recordings of children indefinitely to train the Alexa assistant.

Source: Ars Technica