Alexa, Echo Devices, and Your Privacy
Amazon knows that you care how information about you is used, and we appreciate your trust that we will do so carefully and sensibly. Alexa is a cloud service that you control with your voice and is always getting smarter—the more you use Alexa, the more Alexa adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.
We handle any personal information we receive through Alexa in accordance with Amazon’s Privacy Notice. This page provides additional detail about how we use your personal information to provide and improve your experience and our services. Here are answers to common privacy questions.
1. Is Alexa recording all my conversations?
No. By default, Alexa-enabled devices are designed to detect only your chosen wake word (e.g., Alexa, Amazon, Computer, Echo, or Ziggy). The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word. No audio is stored or sent to the cloud unless the device detects the wake word (or Alexa is activated by pressing a button). On certain devices, you can enable features that allow you to interact with Alexa without the wake word. For instance, Follow Up Mode allows you to make follow-up requests to Alexa without having to repeat the wake word and, on compatible devices, interrupt Alexa to make requests. When you join Alexa+, Follow Up Mode will be turned on for your compatible Echo devices and the Alexa app. See the FAQ “How does Follow up Mode work?” in the Alexa and Alexa Device FAQs (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230) for more information.
2. What happens when I speak to Alexa?
When you speak to Alexa, a recording of what you ask Alexa is sent to Amazon's cloud, where we process your request and other information to respond to you. As part of that processing, we create a text transcript of your request to help Alexa interpret and understand what you said, take any requested actions, and provide a response. For example, when you ask, "Alexa, play top hits on Amazon Music," we use the recording of your request and information from Amazon Music to play top hits.
3. How do I know when Echo devices are sending audio to the cloud?
When Echo devices detect the wake word or when the Action button available on some Echo devices is pressed to activate Alexa, a visual indicator appears on the device to indicate that the device is recording your request to stream to the cloud. For instance, a light ring on the Echo device will turn blue or a blue bar will appear on Echo Show devices. When you use the wake word, the audio stream includes a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word, and closes when Alexa has determined your interaction has ended. In addition, Follow Up Mode allows you to make follow-up requests to Alexa without having to repeat the wake word and, on compatible devices, interrupt Alexa to make requests. When Follow Up Mode is on, a visual indicator will show you when you can speak to Alexa without having to repeat the wake word and when your device is recording audio to send to the cloud.
You can also configure Echo devices to play a short audible tone any time audio is sent to the cloud within Settings in the Alexa app. Certain Echo devices, like Echo Input, have the short audible tone turned on by default.
4. Can I turn off the microphones on Echo devices?
Yes. Echo devices are equipped with a microphones enable/disable button. When the button is pressed, the power to the microphones is disconnected and a dedicated red light is illuminated. When the microphones are turned off, you cannot interact with Alexa using voice, as your device cannot record and stream audio to the cloud, even when you say your chosen wake word. Turning off the microphones also disables presence detection on supported Echo devices. See the FAQ “How do certain Echo devices use ultrasound and wifi signals to support presence detection?” for more information.
5. Can I review and delete my Alexa voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa?
Yes. You can review and delete Alexa voice recordings, text transcripts of those recordings, and typed requests to Alexa associated with your Amazon account by visiting More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app and Echo Show devices or https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings). When you make a series of requests to Alexa, your requests may be grouped together for review into a single “chat” if Alexa determines those requests are related to one other. For example, if you ask several questions in short succession about places to visit in Paris, those requests may be grouped together into a single chat in Review Alexa History so you can easily go back to review the recommendations Alexa provided in that chat.
Deleting voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests may limit our ability to personalize your experience and make improvements based on your interactions with Alexa and cause certain features to stop working. For example, if you choose not to save any voice recordings, voice IDs associated with your account will be deleted and voice ID will not work. Similarly, if you delete the voice recordings Alexa used to create your voice ID (by, for example, choosing to have your Alexa voice recordings deleted automatically after 3 or 18 months), voice ID may not work.
If you have changed your default marketplace while using an Alexa-enabled product, you will need to delete all Alexa voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests associated with your account separately for each marketplace. To learn how to transfer your Amazon account to another marketplace, go here (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201248840).
6. Can I choose to automatically delete my voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa?
Yes, you can choose to automatically delete your voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa after a specified period of time (3 or 18 months), or you can choose to not save any voice recordings. If you choose automatic deletion after 3 or 18 months, we will delete the voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests associated with a chat once the specified period of time has passed since your last request to Alexa within that chat. If you choose not to save any voice recordings, we will automatically delete your voice recordings after we process your requests and automatically delete all existing voice recordings associated with your account, but your text transcripts of those recordings and any typed requests will be retained for 30 days after your last interaction with Alexa in a given chat, after they will automatically be deleted. We retain those text transcripts and typed requests to allow you to review the requests you make to Alexa, and to improve your Alexa experience and our services. You can delete the text transcripts at any time by going to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app or https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings).
7. What happens when I delete my voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa?
When you delete Alexa voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa associated with a chat, we will delete those items from Amazon’s cloud. We may still retain other records of your Alexa interactions, such as attachments you shared with Alexa, information you provided through your interactions, records of actions Alexa took in response to your requests, records of products you searched for, and other information related to your requests. This allows us, for instance, to continue to provide your reminders, timers, and alarms, process your orders, personalize your experience, remember your preferences and the things you’ve shared with Alexa (like notes in Remember This and information relevant to you), show your shopping lists, tasks, and messages sent through Alexa Communication, and answer questions about attachments you’ve shared with Alexa. If your request was processed by an Alexa skill, deleting your voice recordings does not delete any information retained by the developer of that skill (skill developers do not receive voice recordings). For more information on Alexa skills, refer to the FAQ “How do Alexa skills work?” For more information on notes, refer to the FAQ “What is Remember This?” For more information on removing messages sent through Alexa Communication, refer to the FAQ “How do I remove Alexa messages from my conversation list?” For more information about reviewing, downloading, or deleting an attachment you’ve shared with Alexa, refer to the FAQ “How does Review Attachments work?” For more information on deleting the voice recordings you used to teach Alexa your voice when you created a voice ID, refer to the FAQ “How does voice ID work?"
8. How does deletion work?
You can delete certain data associated with your account. For instance, you can delete your voice recordings, text transcripts of those recordings, and typed requests to Alexa, as well as information Alexa receives from third-party smart home devices, using settings available in the Alexa app or at https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings). When you request deletion, we begin the process of securely deleting your data from Amazon’s cloud storage systems.
Our deletion processes are designed to be comprehensive and can take some time to complete. While we are processing your deletion request, the data for which you requested deletion may still be used to personalize your experience, including by informing Alexa’s responses, and we may still provide that data to you in response to a data access request. We make every effort to ensure our deletion processes run smoothly; however, the specific timing of deletion may vary based on the type of information requested for deletion and the technical operation of our internal systems. Alexa does not support voice requests to delete data in all circumstances, and Alexa may not always interpret or execute requests to delete information made by voice correctly. We design our systems to continue securely processing your requests until deletion is completed. You can always review the voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa associated with your account at any time by going to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app and Echo Show devices or https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings). Data that is collected by third parties, like skill developers, and data stored outside of Amazon’s cloud, like data stored on your Echo or mobile devices, may not be deleted. Your deletion requests may not delete copies of data that have been de-identified and are no longer linked to you or your account. If we have used your data to improve our services, we may continue to retain and use the systems trained on your data after your data has been deleted from our data stores.
For more information on how deletion works in various contexts, see the FAQs “What happens when I delete my Alexa voice recordings, text transcripts, and typed requests to Alexa?”, “How can I delete the information Alexa receives from my third-party smart home devices?”, and “Can I review and delete my Alexa Emergency Assist audio recordings?”
9. How do my voice recordings, text transcripts, typed requests to Alexa, and other interactions with Alexa improve Amazon’s services?
Alexa is a continuously improving service that is designed to get smarter and more personalised every day. For example, we use your Alexa interactions to help improve Alexa’s ability to understand and respond to natural language requests and to train Amazon's machine learning models. Training our models with real world interactions from a diverse range of customers is necessary for Alexa to respond properly to variations in our customers’ speech patterns, dialects, accents, and vocabulary, the acoustic environments where customers use Alexa., and the many ways in which customers engage with Alexa. This training relies in part on supervised machine learning, an industry-standard practice where humans review an extremely small sample of your Alexa interactions to help Alexa understand how to interpret your requests correctly and provide appropriate responses. For example, a human reviewing a customer’s voice request for the weather in Austin may identify that Alexa misinterpreted it as a request for the weather in Boston. And a human reviewing Alexa’s response to a request about a current event may determine whether Alexa’s response was accurate, appropriate, and properly personalized. Our supervised learning process includes multiple safeguards to protect customer privacy. For example, you can review and delete your voice recordings, and you can manage the use of your voice recordings to improve our services and develop new features, by visiting More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app and Echo Show devices or https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings).
10. How does Alexa minimise the amount of data sent to the cloud?
Alexa and Echo-enabled devices are designed to record as little audio as possible and minimise the amount of background noise streamed to the cloud. By default, Alexa-enabled devices only stream audio to the cloud if the wake word is detected (or Alexa is activated by pressing a button). When an Alexa-enabled device detects the wake word and begins streaming audio to the cloud, Alexa performs a “cloud verification” of the wake word using the more powerful processing capabilities of the cloud to double-check the audio to confirm detection of the wake word. If the cloud verification does not also detect the wake word, Alexa stops processing the audio and ends the audio stream to the cloud. See the FAQ “How does Follow Up Mode work?” in the Alexa and Alexa Device FAQs (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230) for more information about how audio is processed for a feature that allows you to interact with Alexa without the wake word.
11. What about "false wakes"?
In some cases, your Alexa-enabled device might interpret another word or sound as the wake word (for instance, the name “Alex” or someone saying “Alexa” on the radio or television). When this happens, we call that a “false wake”. We have a team of world-class scientists and engineers dedicated to continually improving our wake word detection technology and preventing false wakes from happening, including through the cloud verification mechanism described in the FAQ “How does Alexa minimise the amount of data sent to the cloud?”
Anytime your Echo device detects the wake word, a visual or audible indicator will signal it is recording audio to stream to the cloud, and you can review and delete the voice recordings associated with your account (including any audio resulting from a false wake) in your Voice History available at More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app and Echo Show devices or https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings (https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings).
12. What other information could Alexa use?
We may also collect other types of information and use that information to provide and improve your experience and our services.
Here are some examples:
- Smart Home – If you interact with or operate a smart home product with Alexa, such as a light, thermostat or outlet, we will receive information about that smart home product’s device type, features, and status, which allows you to see information about and control that product from your Alexa app.
- Alexa Communications - When you register for Alexa Communication on the Alexa app, you will be asked to import your contacts from your device, which will then appear as contacts in the Alexa app. When you open the Alexa app, your contacts are auto-updated from your tablet or mobile phone. You may disable contact import in the Alexa app. If contact import is disabled, contacts you previously imported from your device will be deleted. If you use Alexa Communications to send voice or text messages to another Alexa Communications user (e.g., on Echo, "Alexa, send a message to Mum" or, in the Alexa App, tapping on the message icon on Mum's contact card), we will process your messages in the cloud to convert voice messages to text, and vice versa. You can turn off Alexa’s use of your messages to improve message transcription accuracy from Alexa Privacy (https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/mycd/myx/) in the Settings menu of your Alexa App or in the Manage Your Content and Devices section of Your Account.
- Item or barcode scanning feature - If you use Echo Show’s item or barcode scanning feature, we will process the scanned image in the cloud to return search results from Amazon.co.uk for the scanned item or barcode. You can delete the scanned images associated with your account by visiting the Manage Your Content and Devices page at https://www.amazon.co.uk/mycd (https://www.amazon.co.uk/mycd).
- Voice ID – If you consent to create a voice ID, we will use recordings of your voice to create an acoustic model of your voice characteristics (your voice ID) and store it in the cloud so Alexa can recognise your voice, call you by name, and do more to personalise your experience. Creation of a voice ID is an optional feature and you can withdraw your consent and delete any voice profile you've created by selecting “Delete my voice” in the Alexa App. If your voice is not recognised for 18 months, we will automatically delete your voice ID.
- Visual ID – If you consent to create a visual ID, we use images of your face to create a numeric representation of your facial characteristics (your visual ID) and updates this representation over time to improve Alexa’s ability to recognize you. Alexa stores these images and numeric representation on-device. Creation of a visual ID is an optional feature and you can withdraw your consent and delete your visual ID at any time through Settings on your device or in the Alexa app. If your face is not recognized for 18 months, we will automatically delete your visual ID. Deleting your visual ID will also delete the images used to create it.
- Third party services – If you use a third party service through Alexa, we will exchange related information with that third party so they may provide the service. For example, if you interact with a third party Alexa skill, we provide the content of your requests (but not the voice recordings) to the skill so the skill can respond accordingly. If you use a third party Alexa skill that requires your location (such as a car service) and grant the skill access to your location, we will share that information with the skill. Information you provide to an Alexa skill will be subject to the skill developer’s privacy practices.
You can find the privacy notices provided to us by the developers of Alexa skills that collect personal information on the detail page for those skills in your Alexa App.
Some Alexa skills are directed to children, as identified by the developers of those skills. We require permission from a parent before kid skills can be used. You'll be asked to give permission the first time you attempt to use a kid skill. You can review or change permissions by visiting the Manage Parental Permission (https://www.amazon.co.uk/myh/vpc/manage) page on Amazon.co.uk or by contacting Customer Service (https://www.amazon.co.uk/contact-us (https://www.amazon.co.uk/contact-us)). Learn More (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GFAFHBBCG76WTBXQ).
You can learn more about Alexa in our Alexa Terms of Use (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201809740).. For more commonly asked questions, including how other Amazon Alexa-enabled devices and features work, please visit Alexa and Alexa Device FAQs (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230).
