PORTLAND, Or. — Amazon said that it was "evaluating options" after recent and shocking news that its Echo device had not only recorded a couple's conversation inside their home, but also had sent it to a random contact.
A Portland, Oregon couple got a phone call from a family friend in Seattle a few weeks ago, saying that he'd been sent audio recordings of them talking inside of their home, according to CBS affiliate KIRO-TV.
"At first, my husband was like, 'No, you didn't,' and he's like, 'You sat there talking about hardwood floors,'" a woman who identified herself to the affiliate as Danielle said. "I felt invaded, like total privacy invasion."
Danielle said she unplugged all of her Amazon devices and reached out to the company, which said it would investigate.
In a statement addressing the incident, Amazon said that the Echo "woke up" because of a word used in the background conversation that sounded like "Alexa," the name of Amazon's voice control system.
"The subsequent conversation was heard as a 'send message' request," Amazon told ABC News in a statement Thursday .
"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,'" Amazon said.
"As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely," the company said.