We’re playing catch up a bit here as this bit of news dropped a few weeks back. There was a report of an Amazon Echo recorded a family’s conversations in Portland, Oregon as well as talks of creepy laughing as well.
So allegedly the Echo woke up due to it thinking it heard Alexa in the background conversation and then it thought it heard a send message request. All of this occurred w/o the family’s knowledge and was made aware of this by their colleague. That’s crazy.
And here everyone was concerned about Google Assistant but apparently, no one was looking at Amazon.
The folks over at USA Today found a solution of sorts to prevent that from happening moving forward. All you have to do is not set up the feature to allow your Echo to make calls. If you still need to use make calls on it, they recommend you keeping your Echo in your direct line of sight so you can see if it’s listening or not. This feature is a highly used feature that about a quarter of their users utilize.
Despite it not really being a massive count of occurrences, Amazon is taking the matter seriously. Amazon is looking into it to make sure this isn’t an isolated incident of sorts as well as looking to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Do you have an Amazon Echo device & use the call feature? Have you seen it recording your convos at home?
