Amazon employees listening to your Alexa chats can see where you live

Image: CHRISTINA ASCANI / MASHABLE

It can see you when you’re sleeping, it knows when you’re awake, it knows if you’ve been bad or good, so pray an Amazon employee with access to audio recordings of your Alexa conversations doesn’t also avail themselves of the ability to look up your home address for goodness sake. 

Although, to be fair, your prayers likely won’t do much good. According to Bloomberg, some Amazon employees who listen to and transcribe customer conversations with Alexa can look up the location data of those customers. 

Mashable was able to independently confirm that some Amazon employees do indeed have access to Amazon device location data. 

This news follows a report earlier this month, also from Bloomberg, that Amazon employs a mix of employees and contractors spread across the globe to listen to recordings of some people’s interactions with Alexa. At the time, when reached for comment, Amazon told the publication that “[employees] do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”

That the latitude and longitude associated with devices is made available to at least some of these employees would seem to contradict that statement. Especially considering all it takes is a few clicks via Google Maps to translate that data into a Street View photo of a home. 

Mashable reached out to Amazon in an attempt to confirm Bloomberg’s reporting, as well as to determine both how many employees have access to customers’ device location data and if any of this is disclosed to Echo customers. 

While many of our specific questions were not answered on the record, a spokesperson did provide a statement downplaying the scale of the issue. 

“Access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions,” wrote the spokesperson via email. “Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems.”

Of course, having “zero tolerance” for employee abuse of customer data doesn’t necessarily stop it from occurring. Because when it comes betraying customers’ trust, being naughty pays much better than being nice.