Well, here we are a good ways past Christmas. Chances are most everyone you know found some kind of tech toy under their trees. A lot of folks got one of Amazon's Echo, Tap, or Dot devices. These all run on Amazon's Alexa app to do their stuff.
I got a question the other day from a friend who got an Echo; Is Alexa spying on me?
The question was spurred in part by a brief flurry of postings online after Arkansas police dropped a subpoena on Amazon for information from Alexa about a murder. There was an Echo in the house where a murder happened and the authorities want to know what Alexa heard.
Now to get to the original question -
For the Echo and Dot, Alexa is always listening for the 'Wake Word' (the Tap has a button that you must push to wake it up unless you've set it to hands-free mode). While waiting for the wake word Alexa is not paying attention to anything else that it hears. Once it hears the wake word (Alexa, Amazon, Echo, or Computer; or sometimes something that sounds reasonably close) it starts paying attention.
Alexa records what it hears after you wake it up and uploads the recording to Amazon's servers. According to Amazon this is to "improve your experience and our services". This is all well and good, but there are occasions that Alexa is recording when I haven't used the wake word. That's because it hears my dog's name as the wake word every so often. So it will record things like 'come here' and will answer with things like "I would if I could, but I may need a helping hand."
You can manage and delete the recordings online in the Alexa app at
https://www.amazon.com/mycd.
So, basically, Alexa is not spying on you but it can overhear things it doesn't need to know.
