Reminder: Your 'smart AI' often involves a low-paid contractor surveilling you

Pay no attention to the low-paid contractor behind the curtain. 

A Bloomberg report on Wednesday shocked readers with the news that the Amazon Echo devices in their homes are sporadically sending audio recordings to both contractors and employees around the world. Rather than an accidental bug to be quickly patched, this practice is key to what makes Alexa work: The workers listen to the recordings and transcribe them in an effort to improve the digital assistant's speech recognition capabilities. 

Oh, and they also share the audio amongst themselves for laughs. Read more...