Is Amazon Alexa spying on us? A man in Portland, Oregon reported that Alexa recorded a personal conversation and sent it to a contact in his phone, that contact being an employee. The man was only notified that this had happened when his employee phoned him and told him to unplug his Alexa devices because he was “being hacked”. At first, he was inclined to think he was being pranked but when the employee went on to describe the conversation that his boss and his wife were having in their home is when the concern grew. The family wondered how could that conversation have been sent over.
In a statement to local news station, KIRO, Amazon said, “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.’ As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”
Seems like quite the unlikely string of events indeed.
There are also the reported cases of Alexa sporadically laughing in homes even at times when there has been no command. Imagining what this could be like while home alone is not an ideal situation.
Amazon told ABC, “in rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh. We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’
“We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter,” the statement added.
While Amazon works out their kinks the family in Portland says they will be leaving their devices unplugged.
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