If you’ve ever wanted to feel more in control of your privacy when it comes to Alexa, Amazon seems to have your back. The company is introducing a single command for deleting your Alexa recordings, making it even simpler to keep the things that you want to stay private as private they can possibly be.
Now if users what to delete their recordings for the day, all they’ll need to do is issue the command “Alexa, delete everything I just said today” and the AI software will scrub the system of anything that was recorded during your conversations from that day.
This change is part of a set of improvements that Amazon has been working on to better the state of privacy in regards to the Alexa software. The company is even introducing more granular control over the recording deletion by introducing a command that will allow users to delete the most recent recording by asking it to delete what was just said.
Amazon does admit that this second command isn’t available just yet and mentions that it will be coming soon. Furthermore it doesn’t actually mention if the first command is already available either, or when it will be if it’s not.
It’s also worth remembering that deleting your recordings doesn’t wipe them from every single system in every form that they exist. Earlier in May Amazon revealed that while you can delete your recordings this didn’t delete every piece of data related to it.
More specifically, there were still transcribed versions of recordings that were present on some of Amazon’s subsystems, meaning only the voice recording itself, containing the audio version of what was said, was deleted when asked.
This new catchall command to delete an entire day’s recordings certainly does make things easier for the user to manage their recordings as it won’t be needed to go and delete every one individually, but there’s still the issue of having the transcripts removed as part of the process.
The good thing is that Amazon did note it was working on a way to have the transcripts scrubbed as well, so eventually those may be part of the deletion process once a command is issued. Should users want some way to look over all of the management controls they have in regards to the Alexa-enabled devices, that’s possible too thanks to the new Alexa Privacy Hub.
This new web page that has incorporated into its information pages on Alexa’s features covers a broad spectrum of privacy-related settings from the wake word to the microphone and camera controls.
The page and information associated with it provide users with a broad overview of the privacy tools at a user’s disposal, so although there are a still a couple of things Amazon is continuing to work on to bring privacy management into full control of the user, the company is well on its way.
Both new privacy-related commands should be available on any Alexa-enabled device so no matter which one you use the command will likely work the same way.