Incident 33: Amazon Alexa Plays Loud Music when Owner is Away

Description: An Amazon Alexa, without instruction to do so, began playing loud music in the early morning while the homeowner was away leading to police breaking into their house to turn off the device.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Oliver Haberstroh and Neighbors.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
33
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2017-11-09
Editors
Sean McGregor

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

An Amazon Alexa, without instruction to do so, began playing loud music in the early morning while the homeowner was away leading to police breaking into their house to turn off the device. Oliver Haberstroh says he was out of the house from 1:50am-3:00am in Hamburg, Germany when his Amazon Alexa began to blast music. The police were called, leading to the door being broken down to turn off the device. Haberstroh had to pay $582 to repair the door (later paid by Amazon).

Short Description

An Amazon Alexa, without instruction to do so, began playing loud music in the early morning while the homeowner was away leading to police breaking into their house to turn off the device.

Severity

Negligible

Harm Type

Financial harm, Harm to physical property

AI System Description

Amazon Alexa, a smart speaker that can recognize speech, play music, etc.

System Developer

Amazon

Sector of Deployment

Information and communication

Relevant AI functions

Perception, Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

Amazon Alexa, AI enabled personal assistants

AI Applications

voice recognition, personal assistant

Location

Hamburg, Germany

Named Entities

Amazon, Oliver Haberstroh

Technology Purveyor

Amazon

Beginning Date

2017-11-08T08:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2017-11-08T08:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Harm caused

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Financial Cost

$528.00

Data Inputs

environment audio, Alexa software, user requests

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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