Smart home gadgets like Amazon’s Alexa have become a common part of our lives, but they also track our every move. Even the voice commands that we tell it to control our different devices are being recorded. It’s understandable if this makes you uncomfortable, but fortunately, there is a way to automatically delete these voice recordings within the Alexa app after a set amount of time.
Let’s dive right in. Firstly, open your Amazon app. Tap on “More” in the bottom right-hand corner and then tap on the gear where it says “Settings.” Once you’re in there, you’re going to come on down to the bottom and tap on where it says “So-and-so’s Privacy.” Click on “Manage Your So-and-so’s Data,” and in here is where you can manage all of these types of settings.
You’ve got voice recordings where you can enable deletion by voice if you want to say, “So-and-so delete my recordings from today or for the last month.” But what we’re going to be looking at today mainly is “Choose How Long to Save Those Recordings.” You’ve got save recordings until you delete them for 18 months, three months, or you don’t have to save them at all.
For myself, I choose to save recordings for three months. Also, note that there is no way to customize a certain time frame at this time; we are locked down to these four options. However, you can go in and delete those manually, or you can come back into the app and delete those manually which I’ll show you here in just a moment.
If you don’t have any recordings to save at all, then there’s nothing for it to kind of tailor that experience too. So in any case, click on confirm for automatic deletion of voice recordings. Note that if you do delete recordings, it might mess up the experience a little bit because it does use your voice and your frequencies to kind of tailor your smart home experience.
If you want to delete recordings manually, then you can come up where it says “Review Your Voice History.” You can choose what’s displaying, and you can tap on “Delete All Recordings From Today,” or you can do it from yesterday, last 7 days, 30 days, or all history. You can do a custom time frame here, so you can do a custom manual, but you cannot do a custom automatic.
And that’s all there is to it! As you can see, it’s super easy to do, and you get your privacy back for at least a fraction of a second.