According to KIRO 7 News, an Echo Dot recorded the private conversation of a husband and wife in Portland, Oregon and sent it to the husband’s colleague all the way in Seattle. The colleague then called Danielle (the woman involved) and told her to immediately unplug all of her Echo speakers.
WTF?!
I’m guessing it must have understood a command to send an audio recording to this person, and not some secret surveillance operation that went wrong. Still ridiculous that something like that can happen by mistake though, only reinforces my idea that this thing ain’t for me.
I don’t know why this category of devices is called “smart speakers“. Instead, I’ve maintained, they should be called “spy speakers“. Situations like this just prove my point. As the Kindle before it was a book sales/delivery device, the Echo is a shopping cart for Amazon.
Perhaps Google should rename their device “Hoover“?
I put an Echo in my garage as an experiment. I use it to turn on and off my stereo and play music. LOL. But as soon as I found out it will respond to ANYONE, and not just my voice, I decided I wasn’t giving it access to anything else. And that’s a huge shortcoming. If I had it hooked to my garage door for instance, what’s to stop any perfect stranger just yelling “Alexa open the garage door”? Siri may not be all that great at times, but at least she’s smart enough to know my voice.
Amazon needs to be completely transparent in a case like this. Staying that “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.”
doesn’t make people more comfortable, it just begs the questions:
Exactly what did happen here?”
What prompt caused Alexa to respond in this way?
Was there a misinterpreted statement or word?
If concerned people don’t know how to avoid potential pitfalls, they’ll avoid the whole thing.
Of course they are going to say something about that! If you really think about this this will come at a later date! Again I will say these Internet of things is coming back to bite us in ass!
Of course they are going to say something about that! If you really think about this this will come at a later date! Again I will say these Internet of things is coming back to bite us in ass!