Amazon's Alexa Data Services team could track users to their homes, claim insiders

Insiders reveal more about the personal information the Alexa Data Services team are able to read from users' Alexa personal assistants

Amazon employees responsible for monitoring Alexa user commands have access to location data and home address details.

That's according to Bloomberg, following up on a report earlier this month that the company has the power to record and listen-in on the devices.

It claims that these powers are could be used by the Alexa Data Services team that transcribes and analyses voice recordings from the Echo smart devices. The purpose of the team is to help improve the voice recognition technology.

This department is believed to be run across three different continents.

But five insiders, talking anonymously to Bloomberg, claim that the data the company is capable of exfiltrating from the devices is far more wide-ranging than Amazon has admitted. They claim that employees working on the voice recognition technology have access to users' coordinates, enabling them to pinpoint users home addresses.

While it's not clear whether anyone on the team has actually done this, two of the employees told Bloomberg that Amazon provides staff with wide-ranging access to customer data that makes it possible for them to find out the identity of a device owner.

However, Amazon has denied these claims by saying its employees don't "have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow".

A number of members of the Alexa Data Services team are reportedly also able to listen-in on audio clips from Alexa devices.

To demonstrate how the team uses location data to improve the way Alexa responds to requests, the employees put a user's coordinates, taken from a recording, into Google Maps and were able to identify their house.

Another tool used by a small group of Alexa Data Services employees lets them tag transcripts of voice recordings. And more than a year ago, the team was able to access a dashboard that displayed the contacts of an Alexa user - including full phone numbers.

Amazon claims that "access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions".

The company added in a statement: "Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems. We regularly audit employee access to internal tools and limit access whenever and wherever possible."

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