I’m not the first and won’t be the last to say Alexa and her speakers are not to be trusted. Remember when the Amazon assistant started laughing at people randomly? Creepy! Now a woman in Portland is claiming that Amazon’s Alexa recorded a private conversation between her and her husband in their home and sent the conversation to a random person in Seattle on their contact list.
“My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," the woman, Danielle, told KIRO 7.
Their conversation was sent to one of her husband’s employees. "The person on the other line said, 'unplug your Alexa devices right now,'" she said. "'You're being hacked.'"
The woman and her family used Amazon devices to control their home’s heat, lights, and security system, but she's now pulled the plug on Alexa, so to speak. "We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house," she said. "At first, my husband was, like, 'no you didn't!' And the (recipient of the message) said 'You sat there talking about hardwood floors.' And we said, 'oh gosh, you really did hear us.'"
In December 2017, a report revealed that smart home speakers are only as safe as the network they’re operating on. Meaning, they're susceptible to hacking like everything else. “I felt invaded," Danielle said. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.'"
Amazon offered an apology but provided no specifics about what caused the incident or what it was doing to fix it. "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,'" Danielle said. "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!"
Danielle is now asking for a refund on all her devices. “Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence," the company told KIRO 7. "We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
