Alexa reportedly recorded a couple's private conversation and sent it to a random contact, the family reported to Amazon as it asked the company to investigate.
Danielle, who did not want her last name used, said the contact in Seattle called her family in Portland.
“Unplug your Alexa devices right now,” the contact, an employee of her husband's, told them, KIRO 7 reported. “You’re being hacked.”
The contact then told them he had received audio recordings from inside their house, and told them what he heard: a conversation about hardwood floors.
“I felt invaded,” Danielle told KIRO 7. “Immediately I said, ‘I’m never plugging that device in again, because I can’t trust it.’”
An Amazon spokesperson told Newsmax that the "Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like 'Alexa.' Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a 'send message' request. At which point, Alexa said out loud 'To whom?' At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, '[contact name], right?'
"Alexa then interpreted background conversation as 'right,'" the spokesperson continued. "As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”
When Amazon investigated, their engineers verified the conversation had been recorded and sent even though it should not have been.
“He (the engineer) apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and said we really appreciated you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix,” Danielle told KIRO 7.
Danielle said Amazon offered to “de-provision” Alexa so the family could still use the Smart Home features but refused to give them a refund for the devices as requested, KIRO 7 reported.
"The Amazon Echo, despite being small, is a computer — it’s a computer with microphones, speakers, and it’s connected to the network," ACLU speech, privacy and technology project staff technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor said, The Washington Post reported. "These are potential surveillance devices, and we have invited them further and further into our lives without examining what could go wrong."
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