Amazon now lets Alexa users decide if they want to listen to it

Mike George, Vice President Alexa, Echo and Appstore for Amazon, speaks at the LG press conference at the CES in Las Vegas, USA on January 4, 2017.Rick Wilking / Reuters

• If Alexa users do not want Amazon to listen to their conversations as part of its human review process, there is now an option for those who wish, according to a Bloomberg report released on Friday. .
• Bloomberg reports that the change was posted on Friday, allowing users to set their parameters. Alexa's smartphone app menu to prevent their audio snippets from being potentially badyzed by Amazon employees and subcontractors.
• Amazon's decision to give users control over their audio data comes as competitors such as Apple and Google have temporarily halted their language review programs this week, due to increased protection concerns of privacy.

• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

If Alexa users do not want Amazon to listen to their conversations as part of its manual review process, there is now an option for them not to participate, according to a report released by Bloomberg on Friday.

Amazon's decision to give users control over their audio data comes as competitors such as Apple and Google have temporarily halted their language review programs this week, due to increased protection concerns of privacy.

Bloomberg reports that the change was posted on Friday, allowing users to set their parameters. Alexa's smartphone app menu to prevent their audio snippets from being potentially badyzed by Amazon employees and subcontractors. In April, Bloomberg announced for the first time that Amazon had thousands of workers around the world listening and transcribing voice recordings of users in an effort to improve its software.

Apple and Google have similar programs.

"We take the privacy of our customers seriously and constantly review our practices and procedures," said Friday an Amazon spokesperson at Business Insider. "For Alexa, we are already offering customers the option of not using their voice recordings to develop new Alexa features." Voice recordings of customers who use this option are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that include manual verification – extremely reduced sample of Alexa requests.

Read more: Google will temporarily prevent providers from listening to Assistant records around the world because data leaks have raised privacy concerns.

Bloomberg said that the human review process had not been mentioned before in Alexa's general terms, but that it was up-to-date.

This week, Apple announced the temporary suspension of its human testing program for Siri, after a recent Guardian report revealed that subcontractors had regularly heard private and confidential information. On Friday, Google confirmed to Business Insider that it had also discontinued its language review program around the world, while the technology giant had investigated a recent leak of audio information to a Dutch media outlet.