A former Amazon manager has admitted he turns off his Alexa device when he wants to keep a conversation private. In a Panorama documentary, to air on BBC One this evening, Robert Frederick said he switched off the device “whenever I want to have a private moment”. “I don’t want certain conversations to be heard by humans. Conversations that I know for a fact are not things that should be shared then I turn off those particular listening devices.” Mr Frederick was previously a senior manager at Amazon’s cloud business AWS, although he left the company 14 years ago – several years before Alexa was launched. He went on to set up a business working on technology for connected devices, Sirqul, where he is still CEO. Alexa can be integrated with Sirqul"s systems, according to the company"s site. His comments are likely to reignite privacy concerns over the devices. Less than a year ago, it emerged that Amazon employees were able to listen into customer Alexa recordings – part of a review process Amazon said helped it train its speech recognition systems. Currently, less than one percent of conversations are listened to, Amazon has said, and customers are able to opt out of this. Amid growing concern over customers’ privacy last year, Amazon introduced a new feature allowing people to delete their conversations. Dave Limp, Amazon"s senior vice president of devices, told Panorama that the company was trying "to make it easier for you to delete those recordings but the system does get better for you personally if you don’t do that".