If you have one of Amazon’s smart devices to turn any television into a Smart TV, you will know exactly what it can bring us. But, on some occasion, you have come across some uncomfortable publicity. Or, you may wonder what kind of information Amazon stores about you through this accessory. In this article we will cover all this and, in addition, we will explain how you can remove ads from your Amazon Fire TV .
What information does Amazon store?
If you are one of those people who cares about your privacy and the information that the different services collect about us, this is the question that you will most care about solving all this. Amazon has become a place where we carry out many actions of our day to day: shopping, listening to music, searches for information, questions to the assistant and a long etcetera. Therefore, in addition to many other data from different channels, this platform stores the following information from your smart devices such as the Fire TV:
- Voice recordings from Alexa.
- Searches.
- Location information.
- Information provided to the Skills.
- Application usage data.
- Use of devices linked to our account.
All this is stored on their servers to, as they themselves explain, improve the user experience and show us ads according to our interest. If this does not bother you too much, it is best to leave all the settings that we will mention below because it is still true that the user experience improves. But, if you think otherwise, now we explain step by step what you should do so that Amazon stops collecting this information and ends the ads based on your interest .
Change Alexa privacy settings
First of all, we will start with the information that is collected through the Alexa voice assistant. As you already know, these equipment for your television include the possibility of interacting with her to request certain information or ask her to do some actions. To access this control panel:
- Enter your content and device management platform from your computer and log in with your Amazon account.
- Once here, click on the “Privacy Settings” option on the top bar.
- Now you will see two different options. Click on the “Manage settings” button that you will find under the Alexa Privacy options.
At that moment you will reach the menu that you can see in the image that heads this section. Different panels are shown here with different information dedicated to each one. Each of these represents certain information that Amazon collects through the use of its assistant . By clicking on the lower arrow of each of them you will access all the options dedicated to that section and, there, is where you must decide whether or not you want Amazon to store that data.
The one that seems most interesting to us is the third menu, where you can configure the permissions that the Skills installed on your computers and the information they have access to.
Set device privacy
Given the information that this platform stores about us from Alexa, it is time to discuss the subject of advertisements and other information of interest.
Following the same access to the Privacy Settings panel that we saw in the previous section, we can get to “Device Privacy” . Here we can see all the smart equipment for the TV connected to our Amazon account and, if we click on any of these, we can see several important settings:
- Device usage data : Amazon collects information about how we use our equipment in order to improve the global user experience and also create personalized promotions that are relevant to us.
- Interest-based ads : The applications that we install on these computers will use our ad ID to build advertising profiles and show us ads based on our interests.
- Collect application usage data : The Fire TV application store collects information about the frequency and duration of how we use downloaded apps to improve their performance and the quality of available applications.
Each of these options has a small “Deactivate” button at the bottom that, when pressed, will explain in detail what functionality this section represents and what will happen if you deactivate it.
We recommend that, if you want to stop receiving ads for things you are looking for , deactivate the “Interest-based ads” option. However, the option “Data on the use of the device” is very interesting that we all have it active so that the overall experience is improved.
