Hello Everyone, As so many of us use iOS to configure Alexa, file the following article under the heading, F.Y.I. (smile).
Mark Alexa creepily recorded a family's private conversations, sent them to business associate By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY Updated 5 hours ago SAN FRANCISCO - A Portland family's private conversations were recorded by their Amazon Echo smart speaker and emailed to a random phone contact of the father, they told a local TV station. Amazon explained that an unforseen combination of random words in a conversation the family didn't realize was being overheard by Alexa trigged an action no one expected, least of all Amazon, which is now working to make sure it doesn't happen again. The Oregon family contacted Amazon to investigate after a private conversation in their home was recorded by their Amazon Echo - the voice-controlled smart speaker - and the recorded audio was sent to the phone of someone in Seattle who was in the father's contact list. "My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," Danielle, who did not want us to use her last name, told KIRO TV in Seattle. The family's house has multiple Echo devices that control heating, lights and security system. At first they didn't believe it when the colleague called to tell them he'd received recordings of their conversations. But when he told them they'd been talking about hardwood floors, they realized he wasn't joking. "I felt invaded," the woman told the television station. More: The creepiest Amazon Alexa stories ever More: Amazon Echo or Google Home? For U.S. households, that's changing More: Amazon's Alexa will be built into all new homes from Lennar How it happened Reached by USA TODAY, Amazon offered an explanation of how the highly unlikely and yet not impossible series of events played out. First, Amazon said, the Echo woke up when someone in the home said something that sounded to it like "Alexa." Next, the subsequent conversation included something that, to Alexa, sounded like a "send a message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud, "To whom?" Next, Alexa interpreted the background conversation as a name in the customers' contact list. Alexa then asked, again out loud, "[Contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as confirming with, "Right." While such an improbable string of events doesn't happen every day, with millions of smart speakers in American homes hearing tens of millions of conversations, it's with the realm of probablity. In this instance, a random series of disconnected conversations got interpreted by Alexa as a specific and connected series of commands. It doesn't appear that the family members actually heard Alexa asking who it should send a message to, or confirming that it should be sent. That's probably a function of how good the Echo's far field voice recognition is. Each speaker has seven microphones which are arrayed so the cylindrical speaker can pick up voice commands from far away or even in noisy rooms with lots of conversations going on. Amazon says it is evaluating options to make cases such as happened to the Portland family less likely. But given that Forrester predicts by 2020 almost 50% of American households will contain a smart speaker, expect more such confusions in the future. Originally Published 4:00 p.m. PDT May 24, 2018 Updated 5 hours ago Original Article at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/24/amazon-alexa-cree pily-recorded-sent-out-familys-conversations/642852002/ -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor. You can reach mark at: mk...@ucla.edu and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
