Amazon Echo Mistakenly Recorded and Sent Private Conversation to Random Contact

May 11, 2018

An Amazon Echo device inadvertently recorded a private conversation between a couple, interpreting the discussion as a command to record and send a message to one of the husband's work contacts. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.667, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.666, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.654, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: amazon
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: danielle's-family, amazon-echo-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/361

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.