Hasta La Gadget!

“We should be grieving with Jessica Walter. That shouldn’t have happened to her.”

The NTSB published a preliminary report on the incident Thursday.

A Portland family tells KIRO news that their Echo recorded and then sent a private conversation to someone on its list of contacts without telling them. Amazon called it an “extremely rare occurrence.”

Portlander Danielle said that she got a call from one of her husband’s employees one day telling her to “unplug your Alexa devices right now,” and suggesting she’d been hacked. He said that he had received recordings of the couple talking about hardwood floors, which Danielle confirmed.

Amazon, when she eventually got hold of the company, had an engineer check the logs, and he apparently discovered what they said was true. In a statement, Amazon said “We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future.”

What could have happened? It seems likely that the Echo’s voice recognition service misheard something, interpreting it as instructions to record the conversation like a note or message. And then it apparently also misheard them say to send the recording to this particular person. And it did all this without saying anything back.

The house reportedly had multiple Alexa devices, so it’s also possible that the system decided to ask for confirmation on the wrong device — saying “All right, I’ve sent that to Steve” on the living room Echo because the users’ voices carried from the kitchen. Or something.

Naturally no one expects to have their conversations sent out to an acquaintance, but it must also admitted that the Echo is, fundamentally, a device that listens to every conversation you have and constantly sends that data to places on the internet. It also remembers more stuff now. If something does go wrong, “sending your conversation somewhere it isn’t supposed to go” seems a pretty reasonable way for it to happen.

I’ve asked Amazon for more details on what happened, but as the family hasn’t received one, I don’t expect much.

Trust in autonomous vehicles has faded among American drivers, new research suggests, with recent crashes and other incidents blamed for souring potential riders on the developing technology. While a number of companies have closed trials underway involving driverless cars, the general expectation among automakers and others is that it won’t be until 2020 or later before services begin to take … Continue reading

Amazon is investigating how an Echo recorded a conversation and sent that to another person, after one Portland couple claims the smart speaker eavesdropped on their discussion. The incident, which Amazon has described as “an extremely rare occurrence,” is likely to reignite concerns around privacy, the Internet of Things, and increasingly connected devices. The smart speaker owner says that she … Continue reading