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As secret recordings go, the Portland couple's conversation was pretty mundane: They were talking about hardwood floors.

But their Amazon Echo was listening and recording their discussion. The device then sent the recording to someone in their contacts — without the couple's knowledge.

 Seattle TV station KIRO 7 that they learned something was amiss when they received a phone call from the husband's employee who lived in Seattle, telling them what he had inadvertently received. He told them to unplug their Alexa devices right away.


Danielle says she and her husband went around the house unplugging their devices — which they had in each room, controlling their home's temperature, lights and security.

The employee sent the couple the sound file that the Echo had sent to him, and they were shocked to realize they had essentially been bugged.

"I felt invaded," Danielle told KIRO. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.' "

How did this happen? Here's Amazon's explanation of the unsettling episode:

, Alexa heard background conversation and misconstrued it as very specific directives. And it all happened without the people in the room knowing that the device was listening, much less recording their conversation and shipping it out, supposedly on their behalf.
Last year, a North Carolina man said 

: His Echo recorded 20 seconds of his conversation and sent it to his insurance agent without his knowledge.


Why was the Echo recording the conversation in the first place?


"Amazon's Echo uses seven microphones and noise-canceling tech to listen out for its wake word," 

. "Doing so, it records about a second of ambient sound on the device, which it constantly discards and replaces. But once it thinks it hears its wake word, the Echo's blue light ring activates and it begins sending a recording of what it hears to Amazon's computers."



While "home assistants" such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod have been big sellers in the past few years, they've brought with them a litany of privacy and practical concerns.

 for a 6-year-old who asked Alexa for one. And the time Burger King ran an ad that said, "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?" — 

causing Google Home devices to dutifully reply

 with info from the Whopper Wikipedia page.

NPR's own reporting has spurred voice-activated snafus: 

 in 2016 about the Echo, which included the phrases "Alexa, give me a news bulletin" and "Alexa, turn on CNN. Set the temperature to 70 degrees." 

 — by playing an NPR newscast and resetting a listener's thermostat.


But while those episodes had the air of slapstick, these recorded-conversation incidents show what can happen when people welcome devices that are always listening.


"The Amazon Echo, despite being small, is a computer — it's a computer with microphones, speakers, and it's connected to the network," Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a staff technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, 

. "These are potential surveillance devices, and we have invited them further and further into our lives without examining how that could go wrong. And I think we are starting to see examples of that."


Have an Echo and want to know what it has been recording?

: "Go into the Alexa app, tap Settings —> History, and then listen to the recordings Alexa has made of you and your family. (While you're there, you can also delete them)."  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Science

In what it called an "unlikely" string of events, Amazon says its device heard background conversation and misconstrued it as very specific directives.

Amazon Echo recorded and sent couple's conversation -- without their knowledge

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