They know where you live: Amazon’s Alexa reviewers can access customers’ home addresses
- Team that listens to portion of virtual assistant’s voice recordings has access to geographic data that can be used to track user locations
- One employee showed they could jump from customer’s Alexa command to what appeared to be an image of their house in less than a minute
An Amazon.com team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the programme.
The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyses a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The programme, whose existence Bloomberg revealed earlier this month, was set up to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands.
Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed non-disclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the programme.
While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.
Location data is more sensitive than many other categories of user information that would be more difficult to trace back to a real person, said Lindsey Barrett, a staff lawyer and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Communications and Technology Clinic.
