If you needed to get a bit more paranoid about the world, Amazon will soon have access to each and every world you tell Alexa. Amazon is quietly eliminating local processing of voice commands starting March 28. This means every command issued near an Amazon Echo device will travel directly to Amazon’s cloud servers.
Until now, some Echo devices offered an opt-in feature called “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” that stopped audio requests from going to Amazon. That choice is now vanishing.
Amazon insists this move is necessary to harness the full capabilities of Alexa’s new generative AI, branded as Alexa+. The new service promises smarter, more personalized interactions. But these new features demand immense computational power, available only through Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Consequently, even the simplest command will leave home and return via Amazon’s servers.
So what does this mean for privacy?
Convenience at the Expense of Privacy
It’s hardly the first time Amazon has faced criticism and even legal penalties tied directly to Alexa privacy breaches. In 2023, the company paid $25 million in civil penalties after revelations it had indefinitely stored voice recordings from children’s interactions with Alexa devices, contrary to its privacy assurances. Studies have also highlighted Alexa itself as a major privacy risk.
Furthermore, Amazon employees have previously listened to users’ voice samples, supposedly to improve speech recognition. In 2019, journalists revealed that workers reviewed up to 1,000 audio clips per shift. Additionally, footage from Ring security cameras, also owned by Amazon, was accessible by employees and contractors, prompting concerns about how carefully personal privacy is managed at the company.
Yet Amazon insists it’s “focusing on privacy”.
“The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to USA Today. “We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud.”
Choices That Are Not Really Choices
Amazon says only a small minority of Echo owners (0.03%) opted to use the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” feature. But most users are probably not even aware of this option and Amazon hasn’t really gone out of their way to inform its customers.
The company also says it’s not forcing this change, but there’s a big catch. This privacy setting disables Alexa’s popular Voice ID feature, a cornerstone of Amazon’s personalized user experience. Without Voice ID, Alexa can’t distinguish who is speaking and turning off recording saving now guarantees the loss of this personalized experience. Echo device owners now face an uncomfortable choice: surrender their voice recordings and privacy in exchange for convenience, or disable key features that make Alexa truly useful.
Considering that it was previously revealed that Amazon holds on to recordings basically forever, it’s not surprising this has upset a lot of people.
“I don’t understand how anyone could buy and support this product? I assume it has been doing this since day one,” one Reddit user wrote. Another wrote that they are “You receive: Features you never ask for. I receive: “Everything you will ever say.”
The Erosion of Digital Boundaries
Privacy experts see Amazon’s decision as part of a wider pattern: a quiet erosion of digital boundaries between our private spaces and corporate clouds. Increasingly, the “new normal” involves companies having data on everything we do. As artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated — and more deeply embedded in our daily routines — the line between convenience and surveillance becomes even more blurred.
Research has consistently shown that users underestimate how much personal information their smart devices capture. A 2020 study revealed that voice assistants could unintentionally activate dozens of times per day, inadvertently recording snippets of intimate conversations. Such privacy slips, even if accidental, deepen public mistrust and raise critical questions about transparency and control.
Meanwhile, AI’s voracious hunger for data continues to reshape the digital ecosystem. To build smarter, more personalized assistants, companies like Amazon argue that capturing and analyzing user interactions in the cloud is essential. At the same time, there is very little oversight as to what the companies actually do with this data.
For Amazon, the stakes are high. Alexa has long been a financial drain despite its widespread adoption. Amazon sees Alexa+ as crucial to reversing that trend. Subscription revenue, personalization, and more intelligent responses may prove lucrative enough to overcome these privacy anxieties. For us consumers, we have access to more features than we even asked for, but that comes at a price. As we welcome ever-smarter technology into our homes, it becomes crucial to consider exactly how much of ourselves we’re willing to share.
