Get ready for a shift in your Amazon Echo experience. You soon won't have the choice of processing your Alexa requests on your device, locally. Instead, your voice recordings will be off to the Amazon cloud in a jiffy.

According to a news piece by Ars Technica, Amazon dropped an email on a Friday to its customers who previously opted for a "Do Not Send Voice Recording" setting on their Echo devices. The email mentioned a rather disappointing update - Amazon will stop backing up the privacy-enhancing option starting March 28.

Amazon's justifying the move by pointing to their aim of boosting Alexa's capabilities with the help of advanced AI features that rely on Amazon's formidable cloud processing power, thus necessitating the end of this privacy feature - or so the email mentioned.

This move comes hot on the heels of Amazon's introduction of a reinvented version of its voice-recognition AI assistant, now christened Alexa+. The privacy concerns surrounding Alexa aren't new and have been the bone of contention among customers and regulators alike for some time. This led to Amazon shelling out a whopping $25 million in a 2023 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violations surrounding children's privacy.