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Comment by qiqing | Hacker News Reader

A few choice excerpts:

"Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere."

"Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn’t explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions."

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Whatever the Amazon company policy is, Amazon can't legally demand workers not to report crimes to authorities. No amount of NDA or legalese makes that possible. If the workers suspect that there is violent crime going on, especially if children are harmed, they should report it to authorities, no matter what the corporate policy is.

It seems that workers are willing to sing-off their basic humanity and dignity to corporate authorities just like they did in Milgram experiments.

If Amazon does not want to get involved, they should not get involved by listening.

People sometimes say alarming things as part of sex play.

Sometimes they don't.

Sure.

And if there's any question, that's why we agree on safe words.

People may say alarming things while practicing their lines for a play, too. You can probably think of other plausible reasons. But Amazon workers can't know the context.

If Amazon workers hear something that sounds like a situation the cops should intervene in, they're in a tough situation. Not calling the cops could mean letting someone die. Calling the cops could embarrass someone or, somewhat less likely but possible, get someone killed because the situation unintentionally escalates.

Calling the cops definitely draws attention to the fact that Amazon was listening in the first place, which I would argue is a good thing and which Amazon would really like you to forget.

My feeling is that for the sake of the workers' humanity, they should be allowed to call the cops if they are concerned about the user's safety; otherwise you're asking them to ignore their conscience, which is dehumanizing and likely to haunt them.

And if users plan to say alarming things, they should turn off their AI microphones first. Having them know to do this brings healthy attention to the true nature of the devices.

And if I hear some of those things through an apartment wall, without understanding that it's consensual, I'll probably call err on the side of caution and call the cops.

Sounds like the setup for a Sorry, Wrong Number [0] of the modern age.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry,_Wrong_Number

This could work as a short film as most of these human labor arbitrage opportunities exist in emerging economies where they're considered "good" jobs. Such as the Philippines, or Eastern Europe.

I hope they provide counseling and adequate protection for staff, eg frequent polling and 1:1s to early find signs of when it becomes a problem.

Wifes sister is an EMT and she's really a special kind of person. Whether natural for her or a consequence of her profession, things just tend to slip off her like water on a goose. One has to wonder though how much sticks on a deeper level, perhaps surfacing during personal distress years later.

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