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Woman Says Alexa Device Recorded Her Private Conversation and Sent It To Random Contact; Amazon Confirms the Incident (kiro7.com)

Posted by msmash on from the privacy-woes dept.

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.

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. wire tap on sexy time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I received one of these messages just a week ago. Alexa sent me a message of my friend and his girlfriend having a private moment. I immediately texted him to ask if he intended to do that and he did not- so weird.

  2. I'd like to say I feel bad ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd like to say I feel bad about this, but I'm afraid I can't.

    You brought this thing into your home, in the case of this lady apparently a bunch of them. You chose to have microphones scattered around your home, you chose to connect them to the internet.

    I'm over feeling sorry for people who buy this shit and then discover it's spying on them.

    Boo fucking you. If you want sympathy, go someplace else.

    Yet another reason why I will never own this kind of shit, or any of the IoT garbage being peddled to us.

  3. Getting people to care by Bradmont · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been thinking for a while that this is the kind of thing that needs to happen more to get people to actually care about their privacy. Maybe a timed worm that'll gradually install itself on all sorts of these devices, and all at once start sharing recorded conversations with strangers. Or a smartphone virus that randomly takes pictures of people while they're facebooking on the toilet and posts them.

  4. And how were these audio files received? by mkettler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Part of me wonders what really happened here...

    An Alexa device can make phone calls if set up for it, and they apparently had this person's phone number imported into their Alexa contacts, so they clearly had that feature configured.

    So was this just a case of Alexa making a phone call, without "Daielle" being aware of it? If the call was to a google voice number or similar service, it would just recorded the unanswered call and emailed them. This case would be just a speech activated equivalent of butt-dialing, paired with a google-voice emailed voicemail twist.

    Or was this a case where Amazon generated audio files and then emailed them to some random person out of the contact list?

    I kind kind of understand how the first case could happen by accident, but still be disconcerting. However, the second case would be very disconcerting.

    Given that Amazon is offering to de-provision the communications feature for them, I'm inclined to think this was a "butt dialing" incident, but I'd love to hear some actual details to confirm one way or the other. Clearly the title of the news article is designed to make you think it was the second case, where Alexa recorded the call, not google voice, but there's a lot of vagueness here that makes it unclear.

    --
    -Matt