Alexa adds an option to disable human eavesdropping

The e-commerce giant is indeed the first to act among the three companies Google, Amazon and Apple, caught in turmoil for several weeks for non-respect of privacy.

The latter are in fact at the center of various investigations and revelations about listening to requests for their respective voice AI, by humans.

Faced with the highlighting of these practices that are inconsistent with respect for users' private data, but also the problems that result from them, such as scenes of domestic violence or illegal transactions overheard by mistake,Apple first warnedsuspend these human listening programs. Google and Amazon subsequently announced they were doing the same.

And at the start of the week, it was Amazon which was ahead of its competitors in this area. The firm has in fact visibly relaunched its human listening, at the same time adding new options in the Alexa settings. These allow the user to decide whether or not they want to participate in improving Alexa, and therefore whether or not to allow their requests to be listened to by human employees of the American firm.

These options are accessiblein the Amazon app on iOS, but also on the web,via this link.

You have to go to the settings using the 3 bar icon at the top left, then go to Alexa and your personal information.

Then, you have to go down and choose the last title, corresponding to the management of the data used to improve Alexa. On the next page, deactivate the two switches to limit the use of requests made to Alexa by Amazon, and avoid seeing some of them land in the ears of employees of the American firm.

Apple and Google should certainly soon offer identical options for Siri and Google Assistant respectively.

In the meantime, know that it is already possible to do the same, i.e. prevent Siri from sharing your requests. See our tutorial on the subject here:how to stop apple from listening to your siri requests.

Editor-in-chief for iPhon.fr. Pierre is like Indiana Jones, looking for the lost iOS trick. Also a long-time Mac user, Apple devices hold no secrets for him. Contact: pierre[a]iphon.fr.