PSA - Amazon will log all Echo voice commands starting March 28

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Loren

I don’t use Alexa but if you do you might want to consider if you want to continue using it.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.[…] there are plenty of reasons why people wouldn't want Amazon to receive recordings of what they say to their personal device. For one, the idea of a conglomerate being able to listen to personal requests made in your home is, simply, unnerving.[…] Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.