Amazon’s smart-speaker Alexa ‘leaks’ private conversation to random number

A US couple was horrified to find out that their private conversation was recorded by Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled device and sent to a work contact. Amazon blamed the “extremely rare” incident on an unlikely sequence of events.

The family discovered that their Alexa virtual assistant had effectively briefly turned into an eavesdropping device only after they got a call from one of the husband’s employees, who told them he had received a recording of their private conversation, KIRO reported.

The immediate assumption of the employee was that the digital helper had somehow been hacked, as he called on them to shut all Echo devices down immediately. At first, the pair found it hard to believe that the smart-speaker might pull such a trick single-handedly and send their conversation to some random contact.