Amazon’s Alexa comes under scrutiny of Luxembourg privacy watchdog

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Luxembourg’s privacy regulator has requested Amazon (AMZN.O) for info relating to its Alexa voice assistant, a sign of rising regulatory unease over firms’ use of private knowledge.

The rising recognition of Alexa, Apple’s (AAPL.O) Siri and Google (GOOGL.O) Assistant has triggered considerations from politicians and privacy enforcers over how some firms deal with recordings from customers interacting with their voice assistants.

Apple and Google final week halted evaluations of recordings. The Guardian mentioned Apple’s contractors tasked with the job repeatedly heard confidential info and personal conversations.

Luxembourg, which is the lead privacy watchdog for Amazon the place it has its European headquarters, mentioned on Thursday that it’s in contact with the U.S. on-line retailer relating to Alexa.

“At this stage, we cannot comment further about this case as we are bound by the obligation of professional secrecy,” a spokesman mentioned.

Amazon mentioned it has taken steps to resolve any considerations.

“For Alexa, we already offer customers the ability to opt out of having their voice recordings used to help develop new Alexa features,” a spokeswoman mentioned.

“The voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests.”