Amazon confirms it keeps your Alexa recordings basically forever

[silversurfer]

Amazon has acknowledged that it retains the voice recordings and transcripts of customers’ interactions with its Alexa voice assistant indefinitely. The admission raises questions about how long companies should be able to save highly-personal data collected from voice assistant devices.
 
After U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) demanded Amazon outline its data privacy policies, Amazon in a letter that was publicly disclosed on Tuesday said that consumers have the option to delete their recordings – but even if they do, the company or third-party developers may still save records of customers’ interactions with Alexa.
 
“Amazon’s acknowledgement has only left users with further concerns regarding the privacy of their data,” Tim Mackey, principal security strategist, with Synopsys’ Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC), told Threatpost. “That it took an official request from a U.S. Senator to uncover this data retention policy indicates that data collection and retention policies were not readily available to the public… Had Amazon originally disclosed that Alexa retained transcripts of all data processed by the service for an indefinite time, it’s likely that Alexa adoption wouldn’t be what it is today.”
 
Amazon said that it keeps data “to provide the Alexa service and improve the customer experience” for its Echo devices. The company also said that it needed to retain certain “records” regardless of whether the audio and transcripts had been deleted by the consumer or not. For instance, if a consumers uses Alexa to request a car from Uber or order a pizza from Domino’s, Amazon or the applicable skill developer would keep a record of that transaction.
 
“When a customer deletes a voice recording, we delete the transcripts associated with the customer’s account of both of the customer’s request and Alexa’s response,” according to the letter by Brian Huseman, vice president of Public Policy at Amazon. “We already delete those transcripts from all of Alexa’s primary storage systems, and we have an ongoing effort to ensure those transcripts do not remain in any of Alexa’s other storage systems… However, we may still retain other records of customers’ Alexa interactions, including records of actions Alexa took in response to the customer’s request.”

SOURCE: https://threatpost.com/amazon-admits-ale...ly/146225/