Amazon to kill Echo privacy feature and send all your Alexa recordings to the cloud

Amazon is curtailing a privacy-minded feature that will affect owners of certain Echo devices.

In an email sent last Friday to a number of customers, Amazon revealed that as of March 28, it will remove an opt-in setting that prevented audio of your Alexa requests from being shared with the company. Available to users with certain Echo devices, this option processes your Alexa requests locally instead of sending their recordings to the cloud.

Also: Echo Pop vs Echo Dot: Which Alexa speaker should you choose?

Though this option sounds like it should have been available to all Alexa users, it was limited to those with the Echo Dot 4th generation, Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 devices and only to people in the US with English set as their language. To enable this in the Alexa app, at least until March 28, select the supported Echo device and tap Settings. From there, turn on the switch for “Do Not Send Voice Recordings.”

With this option soon to be disabled, does that open up Alexa users to privacy risks?

To address such concerns, Amazon will automatically update the privacy settings for affected users to not save voice recordings, a company spokesperson told ZDNET. In this case, the recordings are still shared with Amazon. But those recordings will then be deleted after the request has been answered. Amazon will also remove any previous recordings still accessible.

Even with the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting turned on, your requests to Alexa have never been fully private. Yes, the audio of your conversations aren’t sent to the cloud. However, text transcripts of your requests are still shared so that Alexa can respond to you, says an Amazon help page. Further, audio of certain Alexa requests, such as making a phone call or sending a message, are still sent to the cloud.

Another feature requiring cloud access is voice ID, which helps Alexa recognize your voice to provide more personalized responses. When you set up a voice ID, the audio recordings that teach Alexa your voice are shared with Amazon. If you don’t allow your voice recordings to be sent to Amazon’s cloud, voice ID won’t work.

Sharing your requests will be necessary if you want to use Alexa and your Echo as fully as possible, for better or worse. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be concerned about your privacy, especially given Amazon’s track record.

Also: Everything you need to know about Alexa+, Amazon’s new generative AI assistant

In 2023, the company was fined $25 million after the FTC and DOJ accused it of misleading parents and users about Alexa’s data deletion practices. In 2021, researchers discovered that only a small number of Alexa skills had a privacy policy at the time. In 2019, a report found that Amazon employees were eavesdropping on Alexa queries to enhance its accuracy. That same year, the company acknowledged that voice recordings were held forever unless users manually removed them.

And what about now? To try to placate customers with privacy worries, an Amazon spokesperson shared the following statement:

“The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback and building privacy features on their behalf.”

Also: Google is officially replacing Assistant with Gemini – and there’s only one way to keep it

Privacy will be another important factor as Amazon launches its new Alexa+ option. Tapping into AI, the new service will be able to handle requests and chats more like a ChatGPT or Google Gemini. That means it will respond with a more natural cadence, conduct longer conversations, handle multiple prompts, generate content, and process documents. And if you want all that, giving up a little bit of your privacy may be the price you’ll have to pay.