Alexa and Google Assistant can be very useful, but as long as you know how to manage your personal data well. Here’s how to delete the voice searches you’ve done
Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa spy on you, or rather, no: they collect data about you. And it’s only natural that they do, since they have to answer your questions. But users are starting to be skeptical about the effectiveness of the privacy measures put in place by Google and Amazon, especially in light of the latest news reported last week by Bloomberg.
According to the American news agency, in fact, some recordings made by Alexa are sent to a team of reviewers in the flesh in order to improve the voice recognition algorithms and the answers offered to users. When you ask something to Alexa, therefore, your request could be analyzed (anonymously, says Amazon) even by a human being.
In this regard, Amazon released a statement to explain the motivations that push it to analyze audio recordings and that, in fact, confirms Bloomberg’s thesis. “Amazon,” reads the press release, “takes the privacy and security of customers’ personal information seriously. We only record an extremely minimal number of interactions from a randomly selected group of customers in order to improve the customer experience. This information helps us, for example, train our voice recognition and natural language understanding systems so that Alexa can better understand customer requests and ensure that the service works well for everyone. We have rigorous security systems at the technical and operational levels, and zero tolerance for abuse of our systems. Employees,” the Amazon memo continues, “do not have direct access to information that identifies the person or account whose interactions are involved in this activity. All information is treated with the utmost confidentiality and, to protect it, we use multi-level authentication systems to limit access, encryption services and audits on our control system; at the same time, customers can always delete their interactions at any time.”
It’s fair to ask, then, how to defend privacy from Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant?
Deleting Amazon Alexa History
The first thing you can do to increase your level of privacy when using a voice assistant is to periodically delete your voice search history. All assistants keep track of what you’ve searched for in the past, no more or less than the browsers you use to surf the Internet do. To clear Alexa’s history you have to use the smartphone app: go to Settings > History and you’ll find all your searches. But you’ll only be able to delete them one by one, which is very inconvenient. To delete them all at once you have to go to the Amazon website at https://www.amazon.it/alexaprivacy.
Deleting Google Assistant history
To delete Google Assistant history, instead, you have to visit the page https://myactivity.google.com where you will find the history of all Google services. You have to select, in the left menu, “View by item” and then “Filter by date and product”. Now you have to uncheck “All Products” and choose only “Voice and Audio” and then click on the magnifying glass to start the search. You’ll see all your voice searches appear, grouped by date. From the menu with the three dots, you can delete each individual voice search. If you want to delete them all at once, you have to choose from the menu on the left “Delete tasks for” and then select the period and, among the products, “Voice and audio”. Finally, you have to click on “Delete”.