Amazon Echo records a conversation, without anyone telling you anything

An Amazon Echo records a private conversation of a couple and sends it to one of the couple's contacts, who informs them of what happened.

Privacy and security are dead and whoever is not aware of this has a problem. The latest major leak of a private conversion has as its main protagonist the Amazon Echo, which implements the virtual assistant Alexa and which is in the home of many American users. There is a big privacy issue, as the device has the ability to capture private conversations, even if it is not triggered by a voice command.

Amazon Echo records a private conversation and shares it with a third party.

This is what has happened to Danielle and her husband, who live in Portland, in the United States, who have received a rather strange call from one of their contacts. Said acquaintance told them that they should immediately disconnect the Amazon Echo device. Apparently, the device recorded a private conversation of the couple and sent the recorded conversations to one of the husband's contacts, who is one of the workers in his company.

This employee called them by phone, with the intention of advising about the capture of the conversation by Alexa. He told them that he had received an audio file, where they had a conversation about changing the dream of his home and the pros and cons of laying a wooden floor. After this, they contacted Amazon's technical service, because they suspected that the device could have been hacked. The engineers got to work and discovered that it had not been a hack.

The Amazon Echo was woken up by a word in background conversation that sounded like "Alexa." Then the subsequent conversation was heard as a request to "send message". At that moment, Alexa said out loud "Who?" At that point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer's contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted the background conversation as "correct." Despite the improbability of this chain of events, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely. " Amazon said in a statement.

Source: TechCrunch