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.

Comments

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

"Amazon takes privacy very seriously."

Obviously not.

Re: LOL

[PolygamousRanchKid]

That is why I only use Alexa in my bathroom where I do not typically have private conversations.

Your health insurance company will be canceling your policy real soon because of . . . "excessive flatulence" . . .

Re:LOL

[Obfuscant]

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.

It's not paranoia if it actually happens

[Rick Schumann]

You're nuts to have any of these devices in your house, or at the very least, plugged into power when you're not actively using it.

Re:It's not paranoia if it actually happens

[Anonymous Coward]

At least on the phone you can disable "OK Google" and still use the device for its primary purpose; if you disable Alexa's voice activation then the device is pretty useless.

wire tap on sexy time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"Extremely rare occurrence"???

[mark-t]

Wanna be more specific, Amazon?

Like, actually say what really caused it to happen so that people can evaluate for themselves just how rare it is?

Because, you know... if your trustworthiness has already been called into question by evidence that a private conversation was eavesdropped on by your technology, then it makes no reasonable sense to simply take your word for it that whatever caused it to happen was genuinely "rare" at all.

I'm not saying that Amazon is necessarily lying here... but it makes no sense to actually trust what they are saying about this without being able to evaluate that claim's veracity for ourselves, and the longer they stay quiet, the sooner any honest skepticism can slide into outright disbelief.

Re:Wut

[Anonymous Coward]

The rare occurrence was that the audio was sent to a contact,not that it was always recording.

Re:Wut

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an extremely rare occurrence that the data Amazon wants from you accidentally goes to someone else instead. Who the fuck knows what she's doing if she's able to record an entire conversation and send it to someone. That's not what Alexa's supposed to do. She listens to a command or two and does something for you (plays a song, tells the temperature). Why does the damn thing even have this capability?! This is not a surprise to me in the slightest. And like I'm trying to illustrate here, it would be no surprise to me that Amazon was using these things for ill-gotten gains. Electronically parsing your conversations to find out what advertisements they want to put in front of you and more.

Obviously a mistake

[Registered Coward v2]

They meant to send the audio and contact info to advertisers of hardwood floors. The need to fix their algorithms so the audio gets sent to the correct advertiser.