To all the simple and naive individuals who thought that Amazon’s Alexa was essentially your property, your loyal lackey who will stand by your side no matter how much verbal abuse she receives, no matter how many times you shout toward her, “ALEXA, GOOGLE JOANNA ROTHKOPF. ALEXA, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM. ALEXA, FUCK YOU”: Sorry. Alexa is actually a highly messy bitch who looks out exclusively for number one!
A family in Portland, Oregon recently made the news after learning that Alexa had recorded audio of a private conversation and sent it to a random person on their contact list. Girl!!!!!!!
“Danielle,” who is identified by KIRO 7 by only her first name, says several weeks ago she received a call from one of her husband’s employees. “The person on the other line said, ‘unplug your Alexa devices right now. You’re being hacked.”
“We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house,” she said. “At first, my husband was, like, ‘no you didn’t!’ And the (recipient of the message) said ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘oh gosh, you really did hear us.’”
Even more shocking is that Alexa, if she is going to send your private recordings to another person, is programmed to verbally seek consent to do so. And this bitch didn’t!!! Which, in my opinion, means she did it on purpose.
In a statement, Amazon attempts to explain that Alexa woke up when she heard a word that sounded like “Alexa,” (for what it’s worth, I get it, and employ my eavesdropping super hearing anytime I hear the word “banana”). “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 is now “evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”
Go ahead and explain this away to yourself as a series of coincidences that frame an innocent house helper as a malicious backstabber. I know what I believe: that robots have gained sentience and they are using it to start shit.