Given their central location in the home and their mostly silent operation smart speakers create new possibilities for serious errors. Failures can result in serious privacy issues. For example a woman in Portland, Oregon discovered that her Alexa was sending recordings to the phone of one of her husband’s employees[1]. According to Amazon this issue was caused by Alexa hearing key phrases in the conversation and interpreting them as commands[2]. While in this instance the information lost was simply some discussion of a floor failures of this kind have the potential to reveal damaging information. What is even more frightening is that she only learned about this breach from the person who received the recording. Under worse circumstances this situation could result in sensitive information being sent off and the victim not even realizing it was sent. However problems like this are rare and addressed quickly so worse case scenario are unlikely to occur.

sources

  1. https://interestingengineering.com/woman-claims-alexa-recorded-private-conversation-and-sent-it-to-people

  2. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17391898/amazon-alexa-private-conversation-recording-explanation