Alexa.. get in the bin
Film star Karen Gillan’s spying fears over device
Karen Gillan has thrown Alexa out of her house because she fears she could eavesdrop on her Hollywood gossip and wreck her career.
The Inverness- born Guardians of the Galaxy star said: “I did have an Alexa – then I got scared that it was broadcasting all my conversations.
“If it can listen to you, it can record you. What if I said something about work and then Alexa broadcast it? It could ruin my career. She could turn on us.
“I love juice, I love the gossip, so I don’t want to restrict that in my own home.
“Oh my God, what is happening to the world? This is a real threat.”
More than 100million Amazon Echo speakers have been sold worldwide and they have become a status symbol in many middle-class homes.
But whistleblowers have revealed that scores of workers in Costa Rica, India, Romania and the US listen to as many 1000 audio clips a day.
Amazon says Alexa records people to improve its voice detection systems but privacy campaigners call her a “spy in the living room”. A former senior Amazon execut ive, Rober t Frederick, admitted this week that he turns off his Alexa whenever he wants to be sure of privacy.
Karen, 32, has good reason to want to protect her career, which has gone from strength to strength since Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014.
She was third on the list of Highest Grossing Hollywood Stars of 2019 after playing Nebula in Avengers: Endgame, and Ruby Roundhouse in Jumanji: The Next Level, and her films have earned about £ 6billion at the box office so far. She is now starring in Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford, out this week.
Karen said of her success: “My proudest accomplishment, I think, is being able to take care of my family financially.”
Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home and Apple’s HomePod smart assistants have become a worldwide phenomenon in the past decade. The number of smart speaker users in the UK grew by almost a third in 2019 after doubling in 2018, and a study by eMarketer has found that 9.5million Brits use a smart speaker, up 98.6 per cent since 2017.
Amazon said : “Echo dev ices a re not des igned to record conversations. They are designed to detect only your chosen wake word. Customers can review and delete voice recordings at any time in the Alexa App, and we give customers complete control of voice recordings in the cloud.”
The company insisted that Frederick ’ s comments “do not accurately portray how Alexa works”. They added that overseas workers “manually review” one per cent of Alexa requests to improve functioning but customers can opt out of their recordings being included.
I love juice, I love gossip. I don’t want to restrict that in my home