That said, Sveum flatly denied any privacy practice violations.
Sveum described how customers can get ads based on their interests whenever they interact with premium content that has advertising on Alexa, such as music and radio streaming.
“This is not an atypical practice – the biggest advertising services in the world do this to best serve their users and their advertisers.” For example, if you ask Alexa to order paper towels or to play a particular song on Amazon Music, the record of that purchase or song play may inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads,” Amazon spokesperson Eric Sveum told Voicebot in an email. “We think that the best advertising is tailored to customers’ interests, which is why in some cases we will use the actions of customers, whether it’s shopping on Amazon or streaming on Amazon Music, to inform the ads we serve. The personas began seeing relevant ads on the web and in audio ads, which the researchers believed implied not only that Alexa was targeting ads, but that data was shared with multiple other parties in transcript form, not as raw audio. The researchers built an auditing framework measuring online ad data collection, then created fake personas with specific interests to interact with third-party Alexa skills and find out what kind of ads they would start to see. The researchers at the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and Northeastern University then claimed the demand for such data is incredibly high, with 30 times higher bids from advertisers compared to standard ads. The data is analyzed to determine what users are interested in and to target ads on the Echo and on the web. The researchers titled the report, “Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem.” It claims that Amazon and as many as 41 partners in the advertising and tracking services collect Alexa interaction data recorded by Echo smart speakers. The report has received some pushback from the tech giant over claims that Amazon has violated its privacy policies with the ads. A new research report contends that Amazon uses voice data from Echo devices to target ads on its platforms and online.
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