You thought your little Alexa devices were a privacy nightmare before? Well, the situation has only gotten grimmer.

As part of its rollout of the "Alexa+" generative AI update — a phrase already weighted with dystopic portents — Amazon is changing it so that none of the requests you make to the tiny-speaker-cum-virtual assistants can be stored and processed locally, Ars Technica reports.

Now, all of that must be done on the Cloud. And that means that going forward, everything you tell Alexa will be stored — forever — on Amazon's servers. 

Once, users had the option to opt out of this, but no more. Last week, Amazon sent an email to customers confirming that the "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" setting will no longer be available starting on March 28.

"As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature," Amazon wrote in the email, per Ars.

The alarming change is as much an indication of Amazon's flagrant disregard for privacy as it is generative AI's voracious data appetite. In fact, the two are inextricably intertwined: it sounds like the e-commerce giant is gathering this information on the voices of millions of its customers to support its Alexa Voice ID feature, which — you guessed it — listens to your voice to identify who's speaking.

But Amazon says that in reality, this change won't affect many customers because very few Alexa-equipped gadgets supported the ability to locally process voice recordings in the first place, those being the Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 15. Overall, only 0.3 percent of Echo owners opted out of having their vocal data sent to Amazon servers, the company said.

This is hardly a comforting detail. It just means that most Echo owners were already being listened in on because they never had control over their privacy to begin with.

And Alexa's privacy track record, charitably put, is poor. The device has been repeatedly caught recording conversations not relevant to any of its functions, even sending chunks of these exchanges to random strangers. Call those flukes if you want, but Amazon employees listen to hundreds of Alexa conversations every day to train the system.

Nonetheless, the company insists there's nothing shady going on.

"The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers' privacy and keep their data secure, and that's not changing," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. "We're focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud."

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