Slashdot Mirror
Woman Says Alexa Device Recorded Her Private Conversation and Sent It To Random Contact; Amazon Confirms the Incident (kiro7.com)
Gary Horcher, reporting for KIRO7: A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon's Alexa -- the voice-controlled smart speaker -- and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family's contact list. "My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," said Danielle, who did not want us to use her last name. Every room in her family home was wired with the Amazon devices to control her home's heat, lights and security system. But Danielle said two weeks ago their love for Alexa changed with an alarming phone call. "The person on the other line said, 'unplug your Alexa devices right now,'" she said. '"You're being hacked.'" That person was one of her husband's employees, calling from Seattle. "We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house," she said. "At first, my husband was, like, 'no you didn't!' And the (recipient of the message) said 'You sat there talking about hardwood floors.' And we said, 'oh gosh, you really did hear us.'" Danielle listened to the conversation when it was sent back to her, and she couldn't believe someone 176 miles away heard it too. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
Further reading: Amazon Admits Its AI Alexa is Creepily Laughing at People.
Further reading: Amazon Admits Its AI Alexa is Creepily Laughing at People.
I assume what happened was they triggered the "send a voice message" function in their conversation and their Echo device's volume was turned down and didn't hear the Echo activation beep or see the light. Based on this guide, all you have to do is say something that sounds like "Alexa send a voice message to XXX" and if XXX is a unique contact id, then the Echo sends it without further confirmation.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help...
To send a voice message using a supported Echo device
1 - Say, "Send a message to [contact name]."
2 - If the name is similar to other contacts in your address book, Alexa repeats the name back for you to confirm.
3 - Once you confirm the name, Alexa prompts you for the message.
4- When you've finished talking, Alexa sends your voice message.
You can be very serious about privacy, but incompetent enough to not be able to do anything good about it.
Or you can be serious about privacy and design a complicated system that is intended to operate on voice commands that sometimes gets things wrong.
The Fine Article is so completely devoid of details as to be useless. There is not a single mention of why this happened. Did the owners say something that sounded like "Alexa", and something that sounded like "send this to Frank"? Or was it something else? The Alexa I have consistently responded when it heard someone refer to Alexi Lalas on the TV. It also responded when the police scanner reported that a Lexus was being pulled over. This doesn't seem like an outrageous mistake to me. Did those people say something that was misinterpreted?
This is how bad the article is: it first says the recording was sent to a random person in Seattle, THEN it says it was someone on their contact list. Random, not random. Same sentence.
Maybe someday /. will start linking to technically relevant information in technical stories, instead of clickbait TV station pages.
My life is just fine without one, too. Doesn't anyone else remember life before there were smartphones? We all lived just fine. ;-)
Yeah, I do. I used to brag about not having one.
It was fine, mostly ... except for all that getting lost, and getting stuck in traffic jams that I could have avoided had I only known. And never having a camera handy when I needed one. And not being able to instantly compare prices while in a store. And ... and ... and ...
Now, a home device, on the other hand, designed for solely voice interface, I'm not seeing the benefit. I'm home, after all. I have a PC and can do precisely what I want, without an insanely clunky interface. And more importantly not do what I don't want.