A recent incident in Oregon shows once again how vulnerable we are to our smart devices. A woman named “Danielle” accused Amazonof recording her private conversations with her husband and sending them to one of the contacts registered on the device without permission.
According to local TV station Kiro 7, Danielle received a call from a coworker of her husband's who warned her to disconnect her Alexa devices immediately. The coworker apparently received the couple's private conversations in the form of audio files.
The couple has four Amazon Alexa devices in their home, which they use to control electrical appliances. Upon receiving the call, they immediately turned off the devices and reported the disturbing incident to Amazon.
Amazon later confirmed the incident after reviewing the device registry. Initially, employees responded by saying, “Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined that this was an extremely rare incident. We are taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
When the issue became more widespread, however, Amazon received a lot of criticism and was forced to provide further explanations. In an official statement issued by the company, it denied the accusation, referring to it as an incident involving misinterpretation of orders and not a case of privacy violation.
“The Echo was activated by a word it overheard in the couple’s conversation, which it misinterpreted as “Alexa.” It then mistook another phrase for “send a message.” At this point, Alexa asked loudly, “To whom?”
Alexa continued to misinterpret what the couple was saying from the words she heard from the conversation and eventually ended up sending their conversation to the man's colleague.
However, this incident, whether accidental or not, has raised concerns about the “listening” capabilities of smart assistants. Companies need to take strict action and implement smarter technologies to prevent devices from spying on their users’ conversations.
