Confirming privacy advocates’ worst nightmares, an Amazon Echo not only recorded a private conversation without permission but then sent it to a random contact on the device.

The strange story of technology gone wild takes us to Portland, Oregon, where a woman named Danielle, who declined to give her last name to local media, said her Echo smart speaker recorded a private conversation she had with her husband. Worse yet, it subsequently sent the recording to a person in Seattle who was in the family’s contact list.

Danielle added that they were only made aware that the conversation had been recorded and forwarded when the recipient contacted them and suggested they “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.'”

“I felt invaded,” she said. “A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, ‘I’m never plugging that device in again, because I can’t trust it.'”

Going into damage control, Amazon has confirmed that the story is true but at the same time said that it had “determined this was an extremely rare occurrence.”

“Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa’ then the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request,” Amazon said in a statement. “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.”

Although Amazon may claim the string of events was “unlikely,” what was likely is that an always-on technology that constantly listens to everything in a room could intentionally or accidentally record a conversation without the permission of the user to begin with.

A report in August noted that the devices can be easily turned into a spying device, and others warn that Amazon Echo and similar smart home devices are self-installed wiretaps that monitor your every move.

Photo: mastermaq/Flickr