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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 26 2018, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the random-acts-of-predictable-randomness dept.

From a Business Insider Article

A couple in Portland, Oregon, say that speakers in their home powered by Amazon's Alexa smart voice assistant recorded a private conversation and sent the recording to a person in their contacts.

A woman named Danielle says she and her husband got a call two weeks ago from the contact, who told them to immediately unplug all their devices because he had heard their conversation in his home 176 miles away in Seattle, KIRO-TV first reported. She said he proved it by providing details about the conversation.

Amazon told the news station: "Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."

[...] Here's what happened, according to Amazon:

"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 as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely."

If we're going to be unable to resist having devices in our private spaces which can record our private conversations, then Amazon needs to step up and seriously upgrade the security and privacy to the level we've come to expect from IoT devices.


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  • (Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:44AM

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:44AM (#684804)

    That's hilarious. That buzzard guy mentioned in the journal is the one most entertaining to me, and the one who wins at life because he's on a boat. The phoenix thing looks familiar too - must have said some stupid shit I read sometime.

    So this buzztard says something like their twitter or facebook account broke and they questioned the people on the site, and the people said they don't read the headlines on twitter. So he decides to just not debug his twitter-posting code since those several hundred followers they have on there are clearly just getting their news from the homepage instead. I point out that their user count here is low, and that the twits who get their soylent feed from twitter didn't get to read his "are you using twitter" question, which he didn't post on twitter.

    They guy responds that he owns a boat on a lake and wins at life, so I shouldn't talk because I don't know shit. I let him know that I have traveled the world, speak a bunch of languages, am 40 not 14, own houses and rent apartments, and have a 20 year professional career, having had as clients half the companies on the fortune500. I don't own a boat though - but I definitely know shit. This turns into a multi-user shitstorm of "you 9-5 office loser working for big corporate, why do you feel you need to defend yourself, why are you so insecure..." How could I be insecure with such huge balls? I shave mine for pre-fuck's sake.

    Well, I guess I enjoy being a real adult with a career, looking attractive, being successful. Some, and definitely only some, who have low self esteem And are butt ugly can rejected society before it rejects them, never get over it, and redefine success so they are successful on a boat instead of being successful in an actual enjoyable life. If they didn't convince themselves of their awesome virtual little world - they'd blow their brains out while crying alone in the basement. Although I do only come in to the office a couple of times a week - I guess I should buy a boat and spend the other workdays on it so I also could win at life while washing my huge dick and balls.

    The journal guy left soylent because of phoenix buzztart. I'm here because of these guys. Intelligent conversation - there are other places. What I like about this one is they don't delete comments, and there are many of these idiots to entertain me - the same way a comedy does. Ever watch a retard midget fight it out in the park? How could you not enjoy that. If you come here for an argument, you're in the wrong place. This is abuse of the obtuse.