Poor Alexa isn’t so smart after all

REVELATIONS that an Amazon Echo smart speaker inadvertently sent a family’s private conversation to an acquaintance shows the risks that come with new technologies.

According to Amazon, the Echo’s Alexa voice assistant misheard a word as “Alexa” - a trigger to activate the device and interpreted subsequent conversation as a “send message” request. That conversation in a home in Portland, Oregon, was then recorded and sent to an acquaintance in Seattle on the family’s contact list.

Amazon blamed an “unlikely” string of events, and the company already has many privacy safeguards built into the device. Yet the incident shows that even with the best intentions, the risk is never zero. Gadgets these days come loaded with microphones and cameras, and they are all vulnerable to hacking or errors.