A family in Portland, Oregon, USA has claimed that their Amazon Echo recorded a conversation and sent it to random contact who turned out to be the husband’s employee. The husband’s employee sent the audio files of their chats to the family, the one he received from the smart speaker. The family was using the smart speaker to control a lot of smart gadgets in their hose including heat, lights and security. After the incident came to the family’s notice, they unplugged all the Amazon devices and reached out to the company. After the incident, the family reached out to Amazon.
The wife told Kiro7, “"They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!"”
Amazon spokeswoman Shelby Lichliter sent the following statement to Kiro7, “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 customer’s 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.”