Your Alexa is secretly recording you, here’s how you can delete the clips

There’s something about virtual assistants like Alexa that doesn’t quite sit right with me – you never know how far their spying capabilities go.

It’s the same with phones, and frequently I’ll be bombarded with adverts for something I’ve just spoken to a friend about, and have never searched for online.

Well, it turns out your Amazon Alexa is actually recording you, even when you’re not directly communicating with it.

This creepy update came to light after an ex-Amazon executive revealed he turns off his Alexa ‘whenever [he] wants to have a private moment.’

He dropped this bombshell on the BBC’s ‘Amazon: What They Know About Us’ Panorama special this week.

The reason it does this is because Alexa uses ‘wake words’ to start recording, and can sometimes pick up false words and start operating without your knowledge.

It might not be a full conversation – it could just be a few soundbites – and an Amazon spokesperson previously revealed why an Alexa might sometimes record without your permission.

According to the Manchester Evening News the spokesperson claimed: “To help improve Alexa, we manually review and annotate a small fraction of one per cent of Alexa requests.

“Access to data annotation tools is only granted to a limited number of employees who require them to improve the service, and our annotation process does not associate voice recordings with any customer identifiable information.

“Customers can opt-out of having their voice recordings included in the fraction of one percent of voice recordings that get reviewed.”

Here’s how you can find the conversations and delete them:

1) Open your Alexa app

2) Go to Settings menu

3) Select Settings

4) Select Alexa Privacy, then choose an entry or review a date range

5) Tap the text that you would like to hear, then click Play

6) To delete a recording, just tick the empty box next to it and tap ‘Delete Selected Recordings’