Amazon Alexa Gets Revenge On Its Humans By Secretly Recording Their Conversation Then Sending It To The Guy They Were Talking About
Source - The Echo device in your room could be secretly recording your conversation — and in some cases, could send it to a random person, according to a report from local Seattle TV network KIRO7.
That’s what happened to a family in Portland, who had their conversation at home recorded and sent to a random person on their contact list.
The report said the family was alerted by a colleague in Seattle who had received the audio file. After confirming the audio file was indeed a recording of their private conversation, the family went on to unplug all of their Alexa-powered devices, the report said.
When contacted by the family, Amazon said it takes privacy “very seriously,” but downplayed the incident as an “extremely rare occurrence.”
You want to know why I don’t have an Amazon Alexa? No, it’s not because my campus edge checking account is in double digits. It’s because I don’t trust the technology. I don’t want an evil little box sitting in the corner of my living room listening to everything I say for this exact reason. One wrong word and Alexa broadcasts your business to the entire world. Then she victim shames you into thinking it’s your fault by blaming it on the “woke word.” It’s an abusive relationship.
People operate under the notion technology improves every little aspect of their life when in reality, most of the time it doesn’t. For example, I have a friend who runs his entire apartment using Alexa. Every time we walk into his place it takes him ten minutes to set shit up because Alexa ends up misinterpreting his commands. You say, “bedroom lights on” she thinks it’s, “foggy nights gone.” He tried to set the temperature to sixty-nine degrees the other day and she said she had no results for “temperate amounts of cheese.” She’s gotten better at understanding and that’s the scariest part. The technology learns by listening when you don’t even know it’s on.
Credit to their PR team for the making it seem like the conversation was the problem though.
In a statement to CNBC, Amazon blamed Alexa misinterpreting background conversation as a set of commands to send a message to a contact:
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 customers 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.
The incident raises privacy concerns of voice-assistant devices, like the Echo, as they gain more popularity.
They say that this was a rare occurrence but I don’t buy it. Chances are Alexa’s got a backlog of human shit talk in her cloud that she’s just waiting to release. So be nice to your Alexa’s, people. That or unplug them. Let’s not let technology ruin us anymore than it already has.
