As Alexa's secret human army is revealed, we ask: Who else has been listening in on you?
Sneezes and homophones – words that sound like other words – are tripping smart speakers into allowing strangers to hear recordings of your private conversations.
These strangers live an eerie existence, a little like the Stasi agent in the movie The Lives of Others. They're contracted to work for the device manufacturer – machine learning data analysts – and the snippets they hear were never intended for third-party consumption.
Bloomberg has unearthed the secrets of Amazon's analysts in Romania, reporting on their work for the first time. "A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands," the newswire wrote. Amazon has not previously acknowledged the existence of this process, or the level of human intervention.
