Amazon Employees Can Reliably locate Alexa DevicesByBill Toulas-April 25, 2019.631 Amazon demands position permits to help create a better experience, but employees have access to this information. The consequences for the Alexa users ‘ privacy are significant as the location tracking will take place in real time. When faced with the argument that Amazon knows where many Echo speaker users or the Alexa app are located, they will respond “of course.” The trouble is that we’re not talking about a cold silicon-made machine that collects your location data to provide “better experience,” but about hundreds of maybe even thousands of Amazon employees across the globe being able to listen to what you’re doing to Alexa pick up your coordinates and paste them on Maps to find out where you’re in real time. The potential for abuse and the breach of privacy go beyond anything that Alexa users would gladly accept if they knew. According to a Bloomberg report, employees of Amazon who have signed non-disclosure agreements that prohibit them from speaking publicly about this topic have access to the geographic locations of Alexa users and they are talking about precise details, not just the rough estimates you get from, for example, IP addresses. Of course they say that Amazon has a strict policy for any misuse of the systems that its employees use but in fact nothing could deter anyone from using such coordinates against an Alexa user and if they did, Amazon wouldn’t even know about it. The tech-giant collects information about the location of the Echo speakers so as to respond more reliably and appropriately to requests in some situations. As for the location data from the Alexa app this is achieved in relation to the features of “location arrival” events “Eta estimation” or “find near points.” But with many Amazon employees having access to the geolocation of the users I d the whole thing becomes a privacy nightmare depending on the ethical behavior of these employees. The entire picture looks even worse when paired with the very recent revelations of Amazon staff curating Alexa’s answers. Opera now provides an advanced security feature that allows its mobile web browser to avoid distracting pop-up boxes. The new feature is available to Android users via the all-new ad-blocking settings. The functionality is not yet available for iOs but may soon become available. One of the most irritating popups we face on almost every website is a message about the ‘ we use cookies ‘ via dialog boxes. While they were introduced strictly according to Gdpr rules, if you visit a large number of websites, they get very irritating. Eventually, opera users will be able to get rid of the annoying alerts on Android for good at least. Using the ad blocking settings on the latest version of the Opera browserunique features, annoying reminders can be deactivated to pull users away from more popular options including Google Chrome. Apart from the new feature to block the dialog boxes, in the current browser update there is a lot more on offer. Home screen shortcuts are finally available when using Android 7.1 or later and there is an option for text size adjustment which is omitted from the text wrap feature. Words. Pages.