Alexa Apparently Recorded A Private Conversation And Shared It Without Permission

It’s the kind of situation that every paranoid conspiracy theorist dreads: A smart speaker recorded a private conversation unprompted and shared it with someone else without permission. This is the situation that a woman found herself in when Alexa apparently sent a conversation that she had in private and sent it to one of her contacts.

This report came from a woman in Oregon who spoke with local news of the event. It reportedly occurred two weeks prior when she was contacted by one of her husband’s employees in Seattle, Fortune reports. The employee told her to unplug her Alexa devices immediately because the Amazon smart assistant was sending out audio of what was going on in their home.

“He had received audio files — recordings — from what was going on in our house,” the woman who identified herself as Danielle told local news station KIRO 7.

Naturally, the first response of Danielle and her husband was disbelief, but the employee provided accurate details of events that were supposed to be private. These details came with the clips that Alexa sent. Once the truth of the matter was confirmed, the owners revealed that they felt violated by the incident.

Danielle did bring the issue up with Amazon upon discovering it and it would seem that the engineers looking into it couldn’t find anything wrong. After apologizing for the incident, they thanked her for bringing it to their attention.

In response to the matter, Amazon told the local news station that it was already investigating this new development. According to what a representative of the company says, the merchant giant is now working to prevent any such incident from happening in the future.

“Amazon takes privacy very seriously,” the spokesperson said. “We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future.”