A Portland woman recently told a local news outlet that her Amazon Echo device had gone rogue[1], sending a recording of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list. On Thursday, two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers.
In the letter, Republican senator Jeff Flake and Democratic senator Chris Coons, who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, ask Bezos to explain how exactly the Amazon Echo device listens to and stores users' voices. The senators also seek answers about what the company is doing to protect users from having that sensitive information misused. Amazon didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment.
The letter, which was reviewed by WIRED, comes in the midst of what Flake calls a "post-Facebook" world, referring to the data privacy scandal in which Facebook says the data of as many as 87 million Americans[2] may have been misappropriated by a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica. "Congress is feeling that we need to be ahead of the curve here," Flake told WIRED. "Companies are establishing procedures and protocols, and we need to know what they are to make sure that privacy is protected."
The letter specifically cites the Portland story, in which an Echo mistook part of a background conversation for the word "Alexa." That caused the device to wake up. Once it started listening, the Echo misheard later parts of the conversation as a series of voice commands instructing it to send a message to one of the woman's contacts. The mishap in Portland wasn't caused by a glitch, the lawmakers write, but is instead an example of the Echo working "precisely how it