The Sun’s reporting did not ascertain the nationalities of anyone captured in the recordings, but consumer privacy groups have raised red flags over possible violations of U.S. law for recorded incidents involving U.S. consumers.
Marc Rotenberg, the president of the digital privacy watchdog EPIC, told Newsweek that corporations generally can’t get around federal wiretapping laws “by saying ‘we’re just doing testing.’”
“The companies claim that recordings only start with the use of an alert word, but there’s lots of evidence that’s not correct,” Rotenberg said of the broader digital assistant market. “They seem to be routinely monitoring speech, which is not surprising if you’re trying to catch an alert. But from our perspective this is classic unlawful surveillance.”
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ information seriously,” the spokesperson told Newsweek in a written statement. “We have strict technical and operational safeguards in place to protect customer privacy, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Data associates do not receive information that can identify customers, access to internal tools is highly controlled, and customers can delete voice recordings associated with their account at any time.”
