Amazon is totally saving your Alexa recordings, but you can delete them – here’s how

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It’s official – Amazon’s Alexa saves every snippet of your voice that it records, unless you manually delete them. That’s according to Amazon’s response to a letter that Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware sent to CEO Jeff Bezos back in May, after the reports of users not being able to delete their recordings came out.

If that worries you, look away now – the way the response was worded makes it appear that even if a user deletes their recordings, Amazon still might have access to the data around the request, or even the transcript of the recording. Yikes.

Alexa saves your recordings for life – unless you manually delete them

Back in May when the last crop of Alexa privacy reports came out, we showed you how to delete part of your Alexa recordings. Now we’ll show you how to delete your voice recordings individually, or all at once – without deleting your Alexa account. You can find out more at the Alexa Privacy Hub page Amazon set up.

To review your Alexa voice recordings:

• Visit Amazon’s site and click Alexa Privacy Settings
• Then click on Review Voice History to go through your recordings and delete them individually

To delete all recordings associated with your Alexa account at once:

• Go to Amazon and click on Manage Your Content and Devices
• Click on the Devices tab
• Find your Alexa device in the list and click on it
• Then click on Manage Voice Recordings
• Then click on Delete and all of those recordings should disappear

That’s it, you’ve now deleted all recordings associated with your account.

Surprised by the news regarding Amazon and how it stores your recordings? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.