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(Flickr / Stephen Brashear)
Q: I like to use Alexa, but I'm concerned about some privacy stories and accidental purchases that I've heard about.
A: Smart speakers such as Amazon echo, Google Home and Apple's HomePod have exploded in popularity.
In 2018, the percentage (41%) of households with a voice activated speaker form almost doubled, the vast majority being Amazon's Echo.
Alexa has skills
One of the reasons it is so popular is that you can expand its capabilities by activating skills, which are like apps for your smartphone. More than 60,000 skills are currently available and this number continues to grow each day.
If you want to get share prices, for example, you can activate 'Opening Bell' which allows you to request the share price. If you are a big fan of Jeopardy, you can activate the Jeopardy skill or, if you are constantly trying to find your phone at home, you can activate the "Find my phone" skill.
When you start to learn skills, one of the potential disadvantages is that because they are usually third-party tools, you can share personal information such as the mailing address, the phone number or email address with these third parties.
Management of skills licenses
To control what Alexa can do, you need to use the Alexa app for your smartphone, your Fire tablet or a web browser.
Once logged into your account, you can tap the three lines in the upper left corner of the app, then go to Settings -> Alexa Account -> Alexa Privacy -> Manage Skill Permissions to see what skills have requested permission to access your personal information. .
Each skill will have a switch that can be enabled or disabled to control access to the specific information requested. In some cases, skills like Uber or Lyft will need your physical address at home to work properly.
Disabling skills
If you activate skills that you do not want or that you do not really need anymore, you can disable them by selecting the Games and Skills option from the user's menu (the three lines at the top left) and by tapping on "Your skills".
Story of the voice
Amazon stores all your voice commands on their servers to improve Alexa's ability to understand you better, which you can view in the "Revision Voice History" section of the Alexa Privacy menu.
You can selectively delete various records or all records, which will generate a warning that this could degrade Alexa's ability to understand you.
Purchase of votes
We have all heard stories of people having inadvertently ordered articles to Amazon because of something that Alexa would have heard, but, frankly, these incidents are rather rare.
If you want to make sure that nothing can be purchased with a voice command, go to Settings -> Alexa Account -> Purchase Voices and make sure the 'Buy By Voice' option is off.
If you want to use the voice purchase while preventing others from using it, you can generate a voice code that will be required before each purchase.
Opt out
The option "Manage the improvement of your Alexa data" in the Alexa Privacy menu allows you to delete your voice recordings from the development of new features and transcription accuracy.
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