I know it’s not just me, but I know that when I’m at home and I say something, I suddenly start seeing commercials on TV for that or a similar product. Is it a coincidence? The answer depends upon who you ask.
For certain, Alexa and other smart speakers have a challenging time understanding when more than one person is talking at the same time. This often mistakenly activates the recording of what it’s hearing. The smartest thing you can do is remove the snooping technology’s capability to listen to our conversations.
How to Stop your iOS devices from listening to you
- Go to Settings
- Go to Privacy
- Go to Microphone
- Note all the apps that have the microphone turned on.
- Proceed to turn off the applications that are using your microphone. This obviously will affect how you use these apps, but give it a try and turn on when needed.
How to Stop your Android devices from listening to you
- Click the Settings app
- Click Google
- Click Account services
- Click Search, Assistant & Voice
- Click Voice
- Go to the “Hey Google” area and click Voice Match
- Turn off “Hey Google” by sliding button to the left
How to Stop your Amazon Alexa and Echo devices from listening to you
Be sure to hit the “mute button” on your Amazon Alexa and Echo when you’re having a private conversation. If it gets activated, your recorded voice will be recorded and available to be replayed later. Which reminds me, you are smart to launch Alexa app periodically and delete the recordings sitting there.
How to delete recordings on Amazon Echo devices
- Launch Alexa app
- Tap Settings from menu
- Select Alexa Privacy
- Tap Manage Your Alexa Data
- Review Voice Recordings and delete
- Tip: Turn on Enable deletion by voice which will allow you to delete future recordings simply by asking Alexa to delete voice history instead of navigating through the app.
More of my security tips here