It is the dream of the connected home. Where technology controls your lights, your security, even the temperature inside your walls.
Then, suddenly, and in secret, the technology takes control and does what it wants to.
In this particular case, it happened not far from SecureWorld's headquarters in Portland, Oregon.
A Portland couple had multiple Amazon Alexa devices around their home that powered their personal IoT setup.
But two weeks ago, Danielle says, she got a call from one of her husband's employees. He said, "Unplug your Alexa devices right now, you're being hacked."
Alexa had recorded the couple and sent the audio to the employee, who happened to be in the couple's contacts. Yikes.
Danielle, who did not want to give her last name, relayed what happened next to KIRO 7 News in Seattle.
She unplugged all the Alexa devices around the home and she notified Amazon. Eventually, she heard from an Amazon Alexa engineer. She tells KIRO 7:
"They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!"
Why did Alexa record conversations and send them to someone else?
Amazon has had to fix listening bugs in the past.
Company engineers have been working on this new problem, and on the afternoon of May 24, 2018, the company told Endgadget it had figured out what happened.
"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."
Did Alexa violate the couple's right to privacy? Well, tech attorney @tiffanycli answered that question with a tweet:
This is quite surprising, is it not? Read the Amazon Alexa policy for yourself.
We also know this much: Alexa keeps getting smarter. University of Washington college students talked to Alexa longer than anyone ever has.
And the students, by the way, were actually talking to Alexa. Unlike the couple who had their conversations recorded and shared in this interesting case out of Portland.
