Does Amazon clearly says that everything you say to Alexa will be recorded and reviewed by its employees? Or they prefer to hide this somewhere in the legal documents using vague wordings? That's what is wrong. They know that if they say about it explicitly, their product will look worse than competitors', so they try to hide it.
Everything you say is not reviewed by employees, that would be impossible given the scale. It clearly says in the article that a very small sample are chosen for human annotation. Every single voice assistant uses supervised machine learning algorithmns, which require labeled data. It won't look better or worse than any of the others in that regard.
Yes, I meant "everything you say is recorded and might be reviewed by employees". But Amazon doesn't have to make every customer a beta-tester. And Alexa could give a warning when setting up for the first time, something like "Look, we are recording everything you tell me so please don't say something too embarassing or something that might get you into a trouble with police". While this is what any honest person should do, no way Amazon or any other major tech company does this.
I don't disagree, it probably should be made more explicit to customers that someone could listen to certain things said to the device. I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between reviewing everything a customer says and having the possibility of certain phrases reviewed.
> Does Amazon clearly says that everything you say to Alexa will be recorded and reviewed by its employees?
Thing is, they can't possibly review everything. Tagging is hard. The taggers can accomplish 1000 data points per day, as the article says. They can only cover a tiny portion of the Alexa data, and probably they use some algorithm to select which part would benefit the model most.
