{"id":21652,"date":"2018-06-03T10:09:15","date_gmt":"2018-06-03T14:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=21652"},"modified":"2018-06-03T10:09:15","modified_gmt":"2018-06-03T14:09:15","slug":"the-story-behind-the-echo-eavesdropping-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/03\/the-story-behind-the-echo-eavesdropping-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story Behind the Echo Eavesdropping Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Snell<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The story of an Amazon Echo sending a private conversation to a woman’s contacts has been making the rounds since it showed up in a local news story<\/a> earlier this week. <\/p>\n\n

Amazon’s statement on the matter<\/a> says that this was a case of a false positive phrase triggering an Echo feature that lets you send voice messages to your contacts. (iOS has a similar feature built in to Messages, albeit not voice activated.) Usually, this requires a few steps worth of confirmation, which again, could be falsely triggered by overhearing a conversation. It’s extremely unlikely, but given the number of requests and number of devices out there, even a one-in-a-million incident is going to happen, you know, one in a million times. <\/p>\n\n

What I suspect<\/em> happened, as some other sites have speculated, is that the confirmation query was issued on a device that wasn’t in the room the people were in. (Or the volume was down on the responding device.) <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I do have a few Echo devices, but I never granted them access to my contacts and never enabled “Calling and Messaging”. If you did, and now wish to disable it, you need to call Amazon on the phone<\/a>. Not joking.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Snell (Hacker News): The story of an Amazon Echo sending a private conversation to a woman’s contacts has been making the rounds since it showed up in a local news story earlier this week. Amazon’s statement on the matter says that this was a case of a false positive phrase triggering an Echo feature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-06-03T14:09:17Z","apple_news_api_id":"6da91a04-a9b3-4f9c-9f9a-08f783582890","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-06-03T14:09:18Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AbakaBKmzT5yfmgj3g1gokA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1518,19,1360,355],"class_list":["post-21652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-alexa","tag-amazon","tag-amazon-echo","tag-privacy"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21653,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions\/21653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}