1. Bloomberg News was the first to report that Amazon employs thousands of people to listen to voice recordings from Amazon Echo’s owners’ homes. Not just when the people are talking to Alexa: recordings are made of any conversations taking place in homes. How does Amazon explain this invasion of privacy:
a) For what reason does Amazon have employees listening to Echo owners’ conversations?
b) What do employees around the world do with the recordings?

2. In what locations are the Amazon employees who work on this until now secret project located?

3. What is the problem with this program as related to Alexa users’ trust in Amazon to ensure their privacy?

4. a) What assurance did an Amazon spokesperson attempt to give users who might be concerned that Amazon employees are listening to everything they say in their homes? Be specific.
b) What information do Amazon employees have about the recordings they are listening to, according to the Bloomberg report?

5. a) How/when do employees working on this program share owners’ conversations with other employees?
b) Amazon assures us that Echo owners’ privacy is safe. How/when might the company’s (and/or its employees) access to owners’ conversations be used in a harmful way? Explain your answer.

6. What is the problem with the opt out function users are given in Alexa’s privacy settings?

7. In addition to Amazon Echo, which other tech devices have human workers that identify people or listen to their conversations?

8. Bloomberg quoted Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers, who said, “You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home. I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved. Whether that’s a privacy concern or not depends on how cautious Amazon and other companies are in what type of information they have manually annotated, and how they present that information to someone.”
a) Do you think Alexa, Ring, iPhone and Google Assistant owners should be concerned about their privacy? Explain your answer.
b) Ask a parent: would the information in this article affect your decision to purchase (or keep) any of these devices? Please explain your answer.
c) Should people trust big tech? Explain your answer.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Anything you write, say, or post anywhere on the internet or any app never goes away. Don’t ever be ignorant of that fact. Don’t say or post anything you wouldn’t say in front of your grandmother or your boss. Seriously.