An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.
While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner. In an April 10 statement acknowledging the Alexa auditing program, Amazon said “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”
Some of the workers charged with analyzing recordings of Alexa customers use an Amazon tool that displays audio clips alongside data about the device that captured the recording. Much of the information stored by the software, including a device ID and customer identification number, can’t be easily linked back to a user.
It’s unclear how many people have access to that system. Two Amazon employees said they believed the vast majority of workers in the Alexa Data Services group were, until recently, able to use the software. In a list of frequently asked questions about Alexa, Amazon says it uses mobile device location to provide more relevant answers and recommendations, and to enable features like reminders designed to trigger when a user reaches a certain place.