OPINION:
A husband in Oregon recently received a strange telephone call from his boss that went like this: Unplug your Alexa. You’re being hacked.
Except he wasn’t being hacked.
His Amazon Echo gadget — the one that’s supposed to be that kindly, artificially intelligent-powered voice of in-home service that tells everything from the current time and date to which items on your to-do list need getting done — had gone rogue, so to speak.
The device had actually recorded conversations between the man and his wife, and then sent them along to the man’s boss as audio file attachments. All this, without the couple’s permission or specific instruction — all that, secretly, absent the husband’s or wife’s knowledge.
Creepy?
To say the least. What comes to mind, in fact, is the big screens of Big Brother that were to stay on at all times in the homes envisioned by George Orwell in his “1984.” The fictional government: Always watching, ever listening.
It’s the stuff of A.I. nightmares, that’s for sure.
Amazon spokespeople admitted the couple had been victimized by an “unlikely” and unfortunate “string of events” that led their Echo to misinterpret noise in the background as instead, commands to record and send.
Unlikely or not, the damage is done.
“I felt invaded,” said the woman, in an interview with the local KIRO 7 channel. “Immediately, I said, ’I’m never plugging that device in again, because I can’t trust it.’”
And therein lies the problem with much of this newfangled, modern technology. Some simply hasn’t been around long enough to test for soundness.
The tech company rush to beat the competition and get the next cool gadget to market has left the consumer, often unwittingly, as serving in the rather uncomfortable dual role of both buyer and guinea pig.
And what’s even worse is that this Oregon couple may be just one of many who’ve experience the same privacy horror. Amazon may deny. But fact is, we just don’t know.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @ckchumley.
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