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About this tool
Step-by-step privacy hardening for Alexa, Google and Siri speakers, with a completion score and the true scale of what auto-delete windows retain.
This checklist hardens an Alexa, Google or Siri speaker across sixteen weighted controls — microphone and camera muting, voice recording retention, skill and action permissions, and account protection — and any missing critical control caps the score. A second calculator turns your daily voice-request count and how long it has been since the account was last cleared into the actual number of recordings sitting in it under your current auto-delete setting, and what switching to the shortest window would remove. Written for anyone setting up a new smart speaker or auditing one that has been running unattended for years.
Open Smart Speaker Privacy Setup Guide on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Provide your input — an image, text, or data.
Let the tool analyze or generate the result.
Review, refine, and reuse the output wherever you need it.
Turning off recording storage and opting out of human review outrank cosmetic settings, and a missing critical control caps the score.
The retention calculator turns daily usage into an actual recording count, so 'keep until I delete it' stops being an abstract choice.
The wake-word control spells out that the mic stays powered but only sends audio to the cloud after local wake-word recognition — not before.
No. The microphone is always powered, but it processes audio locally to listen for the wake word and only starts sending audio to the cloud once that word is recognised. What happens to that clip afterwards — stored indefinitely, auto-deleted, or reviewed by a human contractor — is set by your account's privacy settings, not by the always-on microphone itself.
Reporting in 2019 confirmed that contractors for both companies routinely listened to short snippets of real recordings to improve transcription accuracy, including some that captured sensitive moments. Both companies responded by adding an explicit opt-out for human review, which is off by default in the sense that you have to find and enable it — check Alexa Privacy Settings and Google's Voice & Audio Activity to turn it off.
Unless changed, many accounts default to keeping recordings until you delete them manually. Both platforms also offer rolling auto-delete at 3 or 18 months, and a full 'don't save recordings' option that discards each request right after it's answered. Changing the setting only affects new recordings — anything already stored needs a separate manual delete.
Turn it off, or require a spoken PIN, if children or guests can talk to the device unsupervised. Without a confirmation code, a mistaken command, a curious child, or even a similar-sounding phrase from the television can trigger a real purchase or reorder.