wanshow Amazon Alexa Sends Recording of Family's Conversation to Random Aquaintance

[Pretzel4000]

Portland News: https://www.kiro7.com/www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-device-recorded-private-conversation-sent-it-out-to-random-contact/755507974

BusinessInsider: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-alexa-records-private-conversation-2018-5

 

This is why I don't have smart home devices. Incidents like this go to show that they haven't really ironed out all the wrinkles in devices like this, and why you should be careful about what you say around devices like these. I would like to remind people that there are many TVs out there that could do this very same thing. Don't make any jokes you wouldn't make at TSA with earshot of these things.

 

It appears that an Amazon Alexa randomly decided to record a couple's conversation with her husband about flooring, then send it to a random person in their contacts, an employee of the husband's.

The Portland, OR woman was telephoned by the Seattle, WA recipient of the recording, who told them to unplug all of their smart devices.

Quote

"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.'"

Quote

Amazon told the news station: "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."

 

Amazon offered to disable the internet capabilities of the devices in their home, but would not give them a refund.

Quote

Here's what happened, according to Amazon:

"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."

This is very alarming, as the device reportedly did not give any audible sign that it was recording - something that it is programmed to do.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Please edit your post to match Tech News posting guidelines.

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

As a practical matter, the real problem with a lot of these devices won't be direct recording (that takes up too much bandwidth & space), but the devices listening to conversations & recording them in text. Text is a lot easier to move around & store. It's also far easier to mine for information about you.

 

In this case, it was probably a conversation happening across a larger room, so they missed Alexa's prompts happening. That's a little bit of user error and a little bit on Amazon's side.

 

It's still creepy.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

*strokes their cheek*  I heard you were angry over Frank's cooking.

People are, rightly, concerned about 1984-like monitoring. That's not really how it'd work. It'd only send text logs of what you say because, again, the infrastructure to record that much audio, send it and store it would be pretty rough. You could do it all view Speech-to-Text logs at an absolute minuscule amount of the issues. Which is pretty much what these assistants are doing.

 

The crazy thing is when you realize you're literally paying someone to spy on you for your own convenience at spending money. Trippy. Though these are rather useful tools for the elderly, to be honest.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

I know, but I'm not actually paranoid about it either.   The thing is it's not just the companies we pay either, but a lot of "free" services, like Facebook, are there doing mass data collection too.  Another thing that amuses me is that a lot of recorded or shared data isn't even used in the sense that some people think.  Sure, it could be used for malicious intent, but it rarely is unless there's some massive data breach.  

There's two deeper levels to it.

 

1) These are massive companies with years of government funding & the NSA with carte blanche to access their data.

2) You end up with zero privacy, without realizing until it's actually a problem.

 

Any cellphone can be hijacked by a Nation-State intelligence agency to record you, but it's another thing to leave an active microphone on in your home. 

[Taf the Ghost]

32 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

True, but the data stored can't even be tapped by the government to the level people assume.  It's meta, at most, and they need a warrant to even use it in the first place.

At the official level, sure. Reality? The NSA is a signal intercept agency, and they are very, very good at that. But you're also trusting a massive company with only sending your metadata. 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Damn. That reminds me of the early days of Cortana where I would be sitting in lecture and she would randomly activate as the professor was talking.

[Arika]

how about just the option to disable certain functions.

 

ie

allow Alexa to dictate and send messages = off

allow Alexa to make calls = off

allow Alexa to search the web = on

allow Alexa to make appointments = on

allow Alexa to make purchases from amazon = off

allow Alexa to control your smart home devices = on

etc

etc

 

because this

On 5/25/2018 at 8:01 AM, Pretzel4000 said:

Amazon offered to disable the internet capabilities of the devices in their home,

disables like 80% of what it does. at least give people the choice of what functions they can use

[vanished]

This perfectly sums up why I don't like these things.  On the one hand, they don't offer the ability to do anything you can't easily do already, and on the other, because it's entirely controlled by voice commands and AI, it's rather unpredictable and things like this simply are going to happen.  What is the appeal!?

[iamdarkyoshi]

7 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

This perfectly sums up why I don't like these things.  On the one hand, they don't offer the ability to do anything you can't easily do already, and on the other, because it's entirely controlled by voice commands and AI, it's rather unpredictable and things like this simply are going to happen.  What is the appeal!?

This is why I call these things "spy tubes"

 

They're really not that much more useful than that

[suicidalfranco]

and that's why i use mycroft