Amazon Smart Thermostat

Amazon says they do not sell your personal information. They combine your voice data with third-party data to answer your requests as well as to train Alexa's speech recognition. You can choose to not save any voice recordings, but it will cost you some features.

While voice recordings won't be used for ad personalization, the transcripts of recordings, and the list of actions that Alexa did in response to your voice commands, may be.

Amazon uses personal information for purposes such as advertisement, recommendation and personalisation. Some personal data may be shared with the third parties. Amazon provides third-party advertisers with information that allows them to serve you more targeted ads, though it claims to not use information that personally identifies you. Instead, Amazon uses an advertising identifier like a cookie or other device identifier. The company also promises it does not "knowingly collect personal information from children" under 13 without parental consent.

You can review and delete your voice recordings, one by one, by date range, or all at once. You can also set up an auto-deletion to automatically delete recordings older than 3 or 18 months. You can choose to not save any voice recordings, at the cost of some features. If you choose not to have any voice recordings saved, the text transcripts of your requests will be still retained for 30 days, after which they will be automatically deleted.

Note that even when audio or text records are deleted, Amazon may still retain other data concerning your interactions, such as all records of actions Alexa took in response to your request. They say this allows them to do things like continue to provide your reminders, timers, and alarms, process your orders, remember the things you've taught Alexa, and show your shopping and to-do lists and messages sent through Alexa Communications.

If your request was processed by an Alexa skill, deleting your voice recordings does not delete any information that was authorized to be given to and retained by the developer of that skill. Skill developers do not receive voice recordings, but they may be receiving recordings' transcripts or records of actions Alexa took in response to your requests. This is problematic, because a big share of more than 100,000 skills are developed by third parties that are not necessarily bound by Amazon’s privacy policies. The research by North Carolina State University found that "23.3% of 1,146 skills that requested access to privacy-sensitive data either didn't have privacy policies or their privacy policies were misleading or incomplete. For example, some requested private information even though their privacy policies stated they were not requesting private information." In addition to misleading privacy policies, issues included things like developers being able to claim fake identity ('Samsung', 'Apple'), multiple skills sharing the same Alexa trigger words, etc.

Amazon collects data from third parties about you, to target ads better: "Some third-parties may provide Amazon pseudonymized information about you (such as demographic information or sites where you have been shown ads) from offline and online sources that we may use to provide you more relevant and useful advertising."

Amazon's privacy statement is not entirely clear regarding deletion rights: "To the extent required by applicable law, you may have the right to request access to or delete your personal information. If you wish to do any of these things, please contact Customer Service. Depending on your data choices, certain services may be limited or unavailable.