Alexa is about to send everything you tell it to Amazon

Amazon’s Alexa+ service is rolling out on March 28, and with it supposedly comes a more personalized, intuitive, and powerful digital assistant thanks to its underlying generative AI technology. But for the new features to work, the company is asking a lot from its Echo and smart device users—whether or not they choose to use Alexa+ at all.

Alexa+ is billed as a major upgrade that includes individual voice recognition through Alexa Voice ID, nuanced calendar scheduling, Ring home security system integrations, and product purchasing capabilities. It’s Amazon’s latest effort to generate a profit from Alexa, which lost $25 billion in revenue between 2007-2021 according to The Wall Street Journal last year. While Alexa+ will be added to all Prime subscriptions, users without Prime can enroll in the program for $19.99 per month.

On March 14, many Echo owners received an email from Amazon informing them that their smart devices will soon no longer be able to process Alexa voice requests locally. As Ars Technica first reported, however, the notice apparently only went out to Echo users who already had the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting enabled on their devices. When selected, the privacy setting previously allowed Echo to carry out user commands without first sending the audio files to cloud-based servers. But beginning with the debut of Alexa+ on March 28, Amazon’s cloud services will need to process all recorded audio.

The company says that the policy shift is necessary as they “continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud.” As a result, Amazon “decided to no longer support this feature.”

The impending privacy rollback will affect all Echo and Amazon smart device owners, even if Alexa+ doesn’t interest them. Thanks to the new cloud server requirements, users who continue to enable the “Don’t save recordings” setting will prevent Voice ID from working at all in their Echo devices. This means that while generalized Alexa requests may still work, any personalized Voice ID tasks related to areas like music preferences, shopping, and reminders will cease functionality.

For what it’s worth, Amazon’s email promises “Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud… designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe.” Amazon says these encrypted voice requests are then deleted immediately after processing.

However, the company’s history with customer privacy doesn’t inspire much confidence. News that Alexa and Ring stored children’s interactions without deleting them for years cost Amazon around $30 million in penalties in 2023. Amazon paid another settlement to the Federal Trade Commission that same year in exchange for admitting no wrongdoing after “thousands of [Ring] employees and contractors [watched] video recordings of customers’ private spaces.”

Until 2019, Alexa retained recordings indefinitely until pushback prompted Amazon to offer an opt-out feature. That same year, a Bloomberg report revealed a subset of Amazon employees routinely listened to around 1,000 audio clips per shift to help train Alexa’s natural language processing features. Alexa recordings have also been entered as evidence in criminal trials.

The success of Alexa+ ultimately hinges on how many Amazon customers are willing to exchange privacy for the new services. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be much of a choice even for the people who want nothing to do with the program.