It adds a whole extra meaning to the warning phrase: "Walls have ears!"
Jewel
--------------------------------------------------
From: "M. Taylor" <mk...@ucla.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2018 5:21 PM
To: <viphone@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Amazon Alexa creepily recorded, sent out family's conversations, USA
Today
Hello Everyone,
As so many of us use iOS to configure Alexa, file the following article
under the heading, F.Y.I. (smile).
Mark
Alexa creepily recorded a family's private conversations, sent them to
business associate
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY Updated 5 hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO - A Portland family's private conversations were recorded by
their Amazon Echo smart speaker and emailed to a random phone contact of the
father, they told a local TV station.
Amazon explained that an unforseen combination of random words in a
conversation the family didn't realize was being overheard by Alexa trigged
an action no one expected, least of all Amazon, which is now working to make
sure it doesn't happen again.
The Oregon family contacted Amazon to investigate after a private
conversation in their home was recorded by their Amazon Echo - the
voice-controlled smart speaker - and the recorded audio was sent to the
phone of someone in Seattle who was in the father's contact list.
"My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to
what we're saying," Danielle, who did not want us to use her last name, told
KIRO TV in Seattle.
The family's house has multiple Echo devices that control heating, lights
and security system.
At first they didn't believe it when the colleague called to tell them he'd
received recordings of their conversations. But when he told them they'd
been talking about hardwood floors, they realized he wasn't joking.
"I felt invaded," the woman told the television station.
More: The creepiest Amazon Alexa stories ever
More: Amazon Echo or Google Home? For U.S. households, that's changing
More: Amazon's Alexa will be built into all new homes from Lennar
How it happened
Reached by USA TODAY, Amazon offered an explanation of how the highly
unlikely and yet not impossible series of events played out.
First, Amazon said, the Echo woke up when someone in the home said something
that sounded to it like "Alexa."
Next, the subsequent conversation included something that, to Alexa, sounded
like a "send a message" request.
At which point, Alexa said out loud, "To whom?"
Next, Alexa interpreted the background conversation as a name in the
customers' contact list.
Alexa then asked, again out loud, "[Contact name], right?"
Alexa then interpreted background conversation as confirming with, "Right."
While such an improbable string of events doesn't happen every day, with
millions of smart speakers in American homes hearing tens of millions of
conversations, it's with the realm of probablity.
In this instance, a random series of disconnected conversations got
interpreted by Alexa as a specific and connected series of commands.
It doesn't appear that the family members actually heard Alexa asking who it
should send a message to, or confirming that it should be sent.
That's probably a function of how good the Echo's far field voice
recognition is. Each speaker has seven microphones which are arrayed so the
cylindrical speaker can pick up voice commands from far away or even in
noisy rooms with lots of conversations going on.
Amazon says it is evaluating options to make cases such as happened to the
Portland family less likely.
But given that Forrester predicts by 2020 almost 50% of American households
will contain a smart speaker, expect more such confusions in the future.
Originally Published 4:00 p.m. PDT May 24, 2018
Updated 5 hours ago
Original Article at:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/24/amazon-alexa-cree
pily-recorded-sent-out-familys-conversations/642852002/
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