by Trisha Jalan An Amazon Echo device recorded a conversation between an American couple and sent it to an acquaintance on their contact list. The couple was oblivious to the recording and the message until their the acquaintance contacted them and informed them of the recording. The acquaintance had called the woman Danielle, and asked if she and her husband were talking about hardwood floors in the audio, which she confirmed. He then sent her the audio recording sent by the Echo. “Unplug your Alexa devices right now.” he told the couple. The incident has raised concerns about the privacy of the users of smart speakers, and questions about how much they listen in on users. Extremely rare occurrence says Amazon In a statement, Amazon has confirmed the incident and said that the company “determined this was an extremely rare occurrence" and that they are “taking steps to avoid this from happening again.” Providing an explanation of how the message may have been sent, Amazon has elaborated that the device misinterpreted snippets of conversation between the couple as instructions to send the audio message: Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as "right." As unlikely…
