The company reaped some $2.7 billion in ad revenue in the most sales quarter.īFFs: Amazon Echo and Google Home are secret besties Beyond selling merchandise, Amazon has also forged a lucrative sideline in selling ads to manufacturers who want to reach you while shopping. What you don't need to do is allow Amazon to hit you with personalized ads. (Your entertainment habits and interaction with the Alexa personal assistant are another story. You need to let it remember what items you've shopped for and know the kinds of products you like. In a nutshell, if you want to make use of the Internet's most popular shopping destination, you need to feed the beast. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.Unlike Facebook and Google, which slyly follow you around on your mobile phone and elsewhere to slip in more product sells, even if you're not using their apps, Amazon is rather upfront about the information it collects, even if it's hidden in several pages of a help menu. Market holidays and trading hours provided by Copp Clark Limited. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices Copyright S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and/or its affiliates. Standard & Poor’s and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Chicago Mercantile: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account Amazon confirmed the error and said the device’s always-listening microphones misheard a series of words and mistakenly sent a voice message. Last year, an Echo user said the smart speaker had recorded a conversation without them knowing and sent the audio file to an Amazon employee in Seattle. “The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word.”Īmazon previously has been embroiled in controversy for privacy concerns regarding Alexa. “By default, Echo devices are designed to detect only your chosen wake word,” a company spokesperson said. “While all information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it, customers can always delete their utterances at any time.”Īn Amazon spokesperson clarified that no audio is stored unless the Alexa-enabled device is activated by a wake word. “Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNN Business. People can opt out of Amazon using their voice recordings to improve the software in the privacy settings section of the Alexa app.īloomberg said that Alexa auditors don’t have access to the customers’ full name or address, but do have the device’s serial number and the Amazon account number associated with the device. Amazon said in its frequently asked question section that it uses “requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.” The report said Amazon doesn’t “explicitly” tell Alexa users that it employs people to listen to the recordings. But Amazon said it takes “security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously.” The company said it only annotates an “extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers.” In a response to the story, Amazon confirmed to CNN Business that it hires people to listen to what customers say to Alexa. The audio clips they listen to were described as “mundane” and even sometimes “possibly criminal,” including listening to a potential sexual assault. (AMZN) employs a global team that transcribes the voice commands captured after the wake word is detected and feeds them back into the software to help improve Alexa’s grasp of human speech so it can respond more efficiently in the future, Bloomberg reports.Īmazon reportedly employs thousands of full-time workers and contractors in several countries, including the United States, Costa Rica and Romania, to listen to as many as 1,000 audio clips in shifts that last up to nine hours. Not only is Alexa listening when you speak to an Echo smart speaker, an Amazon employee is potentially listening, too.
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