Posted on 05/24/2018 9:03:28 AM PDT by rktman
A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon's Alexa -- the voice-controlled smart speaker -- and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list.
"My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," said Danielle, who did not want us to use her last name.
Every room in her family home was wired with the Amazon devices to control her home's heat, lights and security system.
(Excerpt) Read more at kiro7.com ...
I guess to sum it up that if you and your wife are discussing next door neighbor ‘Jim X’ and reminding each other what a worthless piece of crap he is that the ‘auto spy’ will send it to him.
Nice....
Of course, when it is easier to look at your phone to see your location, you can expect this kind of result.
Like when ‘WE’ fought the banks to auto deposit your pay check and make the funds available immediately, they reluctantly did it BUT as a result, they started processing EVERYTHING on the same day...
‘WE’ didn’t like the fact that the electric bill you mailed on Mon to arrive on Wed and get processed on Friday to coincide with your pay check, suddenly that was delivered on Tues and up on your account 0000 Wed...
WELL, ‘we’ asked for it and we got it.
How liable am I, if my Google Home bores random people with recordings of silence?
On the other hand, I asked Google last night when it was going to rain. It said rain is expected Friday. So I watered some pepper plants that were looking very thirsty.
lolz
But doesn’t have her face or voice disguised. Yeah, nobody will know who it is. Fidiot!
I’ve noticed lately that Alexa pops on randomly on my Fire tablet. No prompting, just comes on by itself.
I have a friend who was having a hell of a time with our boss (at the time)... and went to send me a text one morning about said boss... and sent it to that boss instead...
I was stationed in Panama in the mid-80s. One day, I picked up the office phone to call, and there were two ladies chatting on it. Wires had crossed over on base (it was not two ladies within my office or my building). So I sat and listened to this conversation for about 20 minutes. It was mostly all gossip but the kind of stuff about neighbor X having an affair with neighbor Y, and got to some ‘juicy’ stuff.
At some point (I’d been silent the whole time) I spoke up and said if I was such-and-such guy....I would have done a, b, and c. At that point, there was total silence between the two ladies. Then one lady spoke up to ask who the heck this was and I identified myself as Army CID (I wasn’t even Army), and we were listening in to every single call on post. They freaked out and that ended the call. I’ll bet they didn’t use the phone ever again while in Panama.
I have noticed an increasing frequency of random tones coming over the T.V and radio. Some are alarms, and people who have not silenced their phones before going on-air; but not all.....
Mine listens to a lot of Death Metal and very random topic conversations.
I can manage to turn my own lights on and off myself for now, thank you.
We don’t enable the alexa type devices in our home,but I have no doubt they’re active anyway. Somebody really smart needs to figure out a way to disable the devices.
On one of George Carlin's first albums, he joked "Every time I answer the telephone, I say 'F- Hoover, hello?"
These days, just play recordings of Obama speeches into it.
-PJ
Don’t let that fool you.
The consumer end of the interface is the stupid end of the interface. I will grant you that.
The OTHER end of the interface is the API end of the interface, which is tied to the remote access end of the interface.
With THAT end of the interface, you can be as intelligence as you want to be.
Good rule of thumb these days with large companies is that the end customer comes last. Look at their actions through that lens and it makes sense.
Example - dig the new Wells Fargo commercials. NFL decision on kneeling. The individual end customer comes last.
LOL! Yeah, NVEnergy keeps trying to “give” us a free remote thermostat. Uh, no.
A good practice for OpSec would be to break those boxes down and make a bundle with the Amazon printing facing inward or so it is covered up. Or possibly put the pieces in a large black trash bag.
With lots of Amazon bling in her house, some unsavory character might find out about her disability and try to take advantage of it.
An undocumented feature.
I was given the Google equivalent as a gift, but I never used it other than to occasionally ask what the weather will be. I noticed that my husband quietly disconnected it one day. He made the right move. :-)
Kids gave us a “fire stick” with Alexa built in. Still in the box in a drawer never to be used. Now, had they given me a proper “firestick”.......
Agree, that “calling” feature and the “ordering” feature are probably causing this. I don’t (and won’t) have mine set up to do that, for me, that crosses a line. But as for “listening in” ... go ahead. If they want to hear me bitch about Democrats all day, it’s there time to waste. There is nothing said in my house that I care about anybody hearing.They’ve probably already recorded Hannity, Ingraham and Levin podcasts anyway.
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