The other day, we reported that Amazon's Alexa spy devices capture everything they "hear" inside people's "smart" homes, and that it's very difficult to erase this data from Amazon's servers. But it's now being reported that Amazon actually transcribes this recorded data into text form as well – and this text data can never be deleted.
According to reports, transcriptions generated from Alexa voice recordings are permanently stored in the Amazon "cloud," without users' knowledge or consent, and users have no option to ever remove or delete them. In other words, Amazon truly has become a Big Brother spying and surveillance asset that keeps tabs on people who are not only stupid enough install Alexa spy devices inside their homes, but also pay to be tracked and monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
CNET, which first broke the story, reveals that Amazon has effectively been lying about its methods and procedures for handling Alexa voice recordings and corresponding transcripts, giving users a false sense of security about how their private conversations are being used by Jeff Bezos and his army of Soviet Stasi-like spies.
"When a customer deletes a voice recording, we also delete the corresponding text transcript associated with their account from our main Alexa systems and many subsystems, and have work underway to delete it from remaining subsystems," an Amazon spokesperson reportedly told CNET in an email, revealing that it's these "remaining subsystems" where the privacy breaches are most serious.
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Former White House official admits there's no such thing as "delete" in the new digital economy
Like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and many other tech giants, Amazon hasn't exactly been forthcoming or honest about how it handles user data. This is prompting much-needed litigation against these tech abusers, including a complaint that was recently filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition is storing children's voices, even after their parents "delete" this data from these devices.
As it turns out, the data stored by Alexa's "Remember" feature doesn't truly get deleted when users tap the delete button. Instead, they have to call Amazon "customer service" directly to supposedly delete their profiles – and even then, it remains unclear whether or not such data truly gets deleted.
"Here's what I tell all of our business executives and consumers: 'Delete' is never really 'delete,'" says Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer and founder of Fortalice, a cybersecurity company. "'Delete' just means that you can't see it anymore."
It's a frightening paradigm that, apart from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), is unlikely to be corrected anytime soon. And it's further exacerbated by the fact that Amazon has thus far sold 100 million Alexa devices to naive customers whom are obviously too dumb to realize how they're willingly embedding themselves even deeper into the spying and surveillance matrix.
"Amazon markets Echo Dot Kits as a device to educate and entertain kids, but the real purpose is to amass a treasure trove of sensitive data that it refuses to relinquish even when directed to by parents," says Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
The two biggest competitors to Amazon's Echo device, which currently holds about 70 percent of the market share for home spy devices, are Google Home and Apple HomePod, which hold 24 percent and 6 percent of the market share, respectively. Both Google and Apple claim that, unlike Amazon, they don't hold onto transcript data "indefinitely."
"When you turn Siri and Dictation off, Apple will delete the User Data associated with your Siri identifier, and the learning process will start all over again," Apple claims on its website.
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