Amazon Echo (Dot): You should change these Alexa settings immediately

You don’t have to be a privacy fanatic to find the curiosity of Amazon and Alexa a little unsettling. After all, technology-loving smart home enthusiasts also want to control how nonchalantly the language assistant integrated in the Echo loudspeakers and the tech group behind it latch into their privacy.

1. Prevents Alexa from listening to your conversations

2. Automatically delete voice recordings

3. Silence in the smart home: deactivate Alexa notifications

4. Who the f*** is Alexa? Changes the wake word on the Echo

5. Disable voice purchases

Fortunately, there are some measures that can be taken quickly: Here are a few tips on how to keep Amazon’s Alexa at bay without having to do without the practical voice assistant:

Prevents Alexa from listening to your conversations

To improve Alexa’s functionality and speech recognition, Amazon grabs all actionable data – including conversation content that was not intended for Alexa and was accidentally recorded. Many users are not even aware of what Amazon literally takes out – because Amazon, like every data-hungry tech provider, secures its permission for this through the small print.

However, you can restrict the extent to which your voice recordings can be used for data analysis and thus block Alexa from your conversations. You can find out how this works in the linked instructions.

Automatically delete voice recordings

Alexa has an elephant’s memory: whatever the language assistant tells her is meticulously stored and catalogued. However, you can also make settings here to limit the storage period of the voice recordings – or to prohibit saving them completely.

You can read how you can make these settings for the automatic deletion of stored data via the Alexa app in a few seconds in the linked instructions.