Amazon Echo and privacy

[Techman]

More privacy issues? Amazon has responded to a Seattle-area news report that an Echo mistakenly recorded a family's conversations, then sent the recording to someone in their contact list. "We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."

[MWareman]

More privacy issues? Amazon has responded to a Seattle-area news report that an Echo mistakenly recorded a family's conversations, then sent the recording to someone in their contact list. "We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."

From: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/amazon-confirms-that-echo-device-secretly-shared-users-private-audio/

More details from Amazon:

Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, 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 customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as "right." As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.