Senators want Bezos to answer for Alexa eavesdropping

How often do Amazon.com’s Echo devices misinterpret human commands, and, say, start recording private conversations without permission? Two senators want to know.

In a letter dated June 11, Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Christopher Coons, D-Del., pressed Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos for answers on the smart speaker’s listening habits, and what the company is doing to protect the privacy of its customers, who often place the Alexa-powered devices in the most intimate spaces in their homes. The letter was first reported by Wired.

The senators, who lead the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, framed the letter around a recent incident involving a family that discovered that their Echo had recorded a private conversation and sent it to a random person in their contacts. The incident highlighted the risks of installing Internet connected-microphones in the home.

At the time, Amazon said the Echo woke up when it heard a word that sounded like “Alexa.”

“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,” Amazon said.

The senators took issue with Amazon’s explanation for what happened.

“Reportedly, Amazon did not attribute this incident to a device malfunction or a glitch in the system,” they wrote. They acknowledged that Amazon has said it is considering options to make these unlikely string of events less likely to occur, but they wrote, “we are concerned that the device in this instance preformed precisely how it was designed. Without prompt and meaningful action we expect that additional instances like the one summarizes above will happen again.”