Jun 13, 2019
Amazon sued over Alexa child recordings in US
Amazon is being sued over its smart assistant's recordings of children. The recordings are stored, allowing Amazon to use them to create a model of a user's voice characteristics to help the service learn to adapt to quirks in the different ways different people make requests as well as to provide tailored responses to different users in the home. The complaints say Alexa devices could have been designed to only send a digital query rather than a voice recording to Amazon's servers - although processing the audio locally would have disadvantages such as potentially driving up the cost of the devices involved and making it harder for Amazon to deploy updates to its voice-recognition tech. "At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so," the complaints state. Amazon has referred reporters to a blog it published last month about a subscription service designed to help parents manage their children's use of Alexa.
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