Amazon’s Smart Speaker Echo Stealing Private conversation

According to Seattle local media KIRO7, Amazon’s smart speaker product Echo may secretly record your conversation, and in some cases, may also send it to other people.

This happened in a home in Portland, Oregon, USA. Echo placed indoors recorded the user’s home conversation and sent the conversation to a random contact in the user’s phone contact list.

According to the report, Echo user whose conversation had been recorded transcripts received a notification from colleagues in Seattle City that they had received a sound file from her. After confirming that this sound file is indeed her private conversation, the user turned off all of her devices supported by Alexa Voice Assistant.

After the incident, the woman contacted Amazon. Amazon responded that the company “has attached great importance to privacy,” and said that the situation was “extremely rare.”

In a statement, Amazon attributed the incident to the fact that Alexa, the intelligent voice assistant, misjudged the user’s instructions, thinking that the user wanted to send a voice to a contact.

In a statement, Amazon stated: “Echo smart speakers will be awakened when they hear something like “Alexa” in their surroundings. In this case, the subsequent conversation is heard as a “send message.” Alex will continue to ask “Send whom? “Echo’s subsequent environmental conversation will be interpreted by Alexa as someone in the user’s contact list.”

Subsequently, Alexa will again ask “Is it sent to a certain pair?” Maybe Alexa later interpreted the environmental dialogue as “right” in response to it. This may sound difficult to happen. We will improve Alexa to reduce the probability of recurrence of such events. ”

The incident has raised concerns about the privacy issues of voice assistants such as Alexa, which is now becoming more and more popular.

This smart speaker device is often placed in the bedroom or living room and can hear all private conversations that occur indoors. Although Amazon had emphasized that Echo would only begin to record the conversation it heard after hearing the “Alexa” awakening instruction.

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