Here's How Alexa Spied on a Couple

first heard about the story, I was intrigued. The headlines says it all woman says her Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to a random contact. Then I watched the segment, which was done by a local news station in Seattle, and I was kind of confused. I really

wanted to know how this could happen. The statement Amazon gave the station was pretty light on facts, but then the big blogs picked up on it and they got a better statement from Amazon, which said Echo woke up due to a word in the background conversation that sounded like Alexa. Then they heard send a message request, at which point Alexa said to whom, to which the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the contact list.

Then Alexa said the customer's name out right, Alexa interpreted in another background conversation as right and as unlikely as this string of events is, said Amazon, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely. All right? So what that all means? The issue stems from a feature on the Echo called Alexa Calling and Messaging, which means you can send voice messages to others who use messaging with Alexa on their Echo. So how does that

work well? For starters? When you open the Amazon Alexa app on your phone for the very first time, it asks you if it can have access to all of your address book contacts. Most people just say yes, and when you do, Alexa imports all of your contacts. This makes it easy for her to send messages or place a phone call using Alexa as a speakerphone. According to Amazon support page, to send a message to someone in this case, this recorded private conversation, here's what you say.

You say, Alexa send a message to the contacts name. If the name is similar to other contacts in your address book, Alexa will repeat the name back for you to confirm. Once you confirm the name, Alexa prompts you for the message. When you finish talking Alexa sends your voice message. Now, I tried this on my Echo and realized a big part of this is that the person on the other end also has to have an Echo

with the messaging feature enabled. In this case, it was an employee of the husband in the couple, So I'm guessing they mentioned this person's name or something that sounded like his name. Alexa tried to confirm. The couple didn't notice, said something that Alexa construed as a confirmation, went on with their conversation. Alexa recorded it, then sent it off to the guy, who then called the couple and said,

you're being hacked. Now, a lot of things did go wrong here for this particular case to happen, but the bottom line is this Alexa with all smart speakers, they mishear commands all the time. I see my Google Home slide up when I'm not saying the hot word. But

there's also a bigger problem here. You would think that to prevent this from happening in the future, you would just be able to disable the messaging feature completely, or if you can't do that, delete the contacts out of your Alexa app so Alexa can't call them or message them. But guess what. You can't do either of these things easily. To disable the messaging feature or delete your contacts off

Amazon servers. Both of these things require a phone call or at least a chat with Amazon's customer service team, and that is the real problem here. Once Alexa imports your contacts, you really can't pry them out of her virtual hands. Amazon needs to change this asap, and I assume they're going to do that very soon, or at least give people some sort of easy way to toggle messaging with Alexa on and off. Some mistakes like this don't happen again. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

If you like what I'm doing here, please leave me a review in the Apple Podcasts app. That way more people discover the podcast. I'm Rich Tamiro. You can find links to everything I talk about here. Plus, if you want to see my video demo of the Alexa messaging feature, just go to richon tech dot tv. I'm Rich Samiro. I'll talk to you real soon.