Amazon Alexa, like Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant, stores all your voice commands on its servers. However, Amazon Alexa is known to share private conversations of its users in the past.
If you are like most serious with respect to your privacy, then you must wipe those voice recordings. Moreover, there is not an option to command “Alexa, stop spying.” yet, Amazon does provide certain methods to delete them, which I am going to share below.
Why delete the recordings?
As of now, we know that Alexa gets awaken when you say its trigger word, so it keeps listening to your conversations to pick up the trigger word whenever you say it. The issue with its always-on, always-listening mode is that it listens to everything.
Occasionally, it may misunderstand your conversations to think that you said the trigger word and it may awaken itself to listen to your further commands. If you think it may not harm your privacy, then let me share an example.
In Portland, a family experienced the exact issue. Their Alexa misunderstood their conversations to pick up the trigger word and further picked up their talks for commands. And the result: it sent the recordings of their discussions to a random person on their contact list. You don’t want that, right?
Delete the recordings
Now that you understand the risks involved with your voice commands getting stored by Alexa, let’s see how to delete those recordings to help you claim back your privacy. Do note that these recordings are used to improve the experience, and if you remove them, you may degrade your experience while using Alexa.
Delete recordings one-by-one
Let’s say you are okay with your voice commands being stored on the servers. However, if you wish to delete some recordings which may invade your privacy, then you can follow the below steps to remove those specific recordings.
- Open Alexa, then its menu, and choose Settings.
- Scroll down to the section “General“, then choose History.
- Choose a recording from the list, then select the option “Delete voice recordings” to delete it. This action will delete the audio file as well as the home screen card related to the deleted recording. Please note that if you wish to listen to it before deleting it, click Play after selecting it.
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