If you’ve been on the fence about bringing Alexa into your home, these new privacy features might change your mind. Not only are you able to customize the way Alexa hangs on to your data, but you can also tell her what to do with it by voice. There’s even a new way to keep your kids safer online when using Alexa by themselves. Hopefully, these new options will empower users to control their privacy more efficiently and protect their families from unwanted eavesdropping. Here are the top features you need to know about.
1. Ask Alexa “Why?”
For the first time, users will now have the ability to ask Alexa for a rationale behind her unusual behavior or responses. If Alexa seems to activate at an inappropriate time, you can simply ask her “Alexa, tell me what you heard” or even “Alexa, why did you do that?” With these prompts, Alexa will inform you of the recording she has made or will explain the process or words that led to her activation. This can help users know if any candid speech or private audio was accidentally captured by the voice assistant, which can help in the process of deleting recordings.
2. Tell Alexa to forget what she heard
If asked on the daily, this will keep your Alexa recording history clean and will prevent any transcribers from being able to look at private audio that may have been captured.
3. This one is for the kids
Using the new Alexa Communications for Kids, you can whitelist specific contacts you want kids to have access to and restrict their ability to communicate with strangers online. Now, the only thing you’ll need to worry about is purging Alexa’s recordings of your kids. But as we’ve seen above, all you’ll need to do is ask.
BONUS: Do this now. Automatically have Alexa purge recordings
So in the event that you don’t check your recordings frequently, or accidentally skip a day of telling Alexa to delete your recordings, you’ll have backup to make sure your conversations stay private.
