Amazon Echo will soon start sending your recordings to cloud
What's the story
Amazon is killing a privacy feature that let Echo device owners process Alexa requests locally and avoid sending voice recordings to the company's cloud.
The change will come into effect from March 28, 2025, as part of the rollout for Alexa+, a subscription-based version of its AI assistant.
The new version is aimed at offering advanced features like recognizing who is speaking to it, aka Alexa Voice ID.
User communication
Amazon's email notification to Echo users
Amazon announced this change through an email sent to users with the "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" feature enabled on their Echo devices.
The company explained the end of local processing by saying, "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."
Naturally, this has raised privacy concerns among users.
Privacy issues
Concerns over Amazon's handling of voice recordings
Concerns about Amazon's handling of voice recordings have been raised in the past.
In 2023, the company had to pay $25 million in civil penalties for storing recordings of children's interactions with Alexa indefinitely.
It was also revealed that employees were allowed to listen to Alexa voice recordings as part of training their speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.
These incidents have contributed to user apprehension regarding privacy.
Company stance
Amazon's response to privacy concerns
In response to privacy concerns, Amazon clarified that by default, it will delete recordings of users' Alexa requests after processing.
However, those who have their Echo device set to "Don't save recordings" will find their Voice ID feature disabled.
Meaning, if you choose not to allow Amazon to store your voice recordings, the Voice ID feature won't work.