Incident 361: Amazon Echo Mistakenly Recorded and Sent Private Conversation to Random Contact

Description: Amazon Echo misinterpreted a background conversation between a husband and wife as instructions for recording a message and sending it to one of the husband's employees.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Danielle's family and Amazon Echo users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
361
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2018-05-11
Editors
Khoa Lam
Woman says her Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
kiro7.com · 2018

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 pers…

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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