Paying to be guinea pigs

As if Alexa sharing a local neighbor’s echo information wasn’t bad enough…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Millions of users of Amazon’s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command.

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

I’ll admit, that line really pulled me into the rest of the article. It also reminded me of a story that I heard from one old man who owns one of these Echo’s, apparently his was shouting out “Praise Satan” among other things.

Meanwhile the news just keeps getting better:

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Companies like Amazon and Microsoft are blatantly making average everyday end users into beta testers for their products. Microsoft has recently stated that they’ve made it so that every single person using their operating system is a guinea pig. It seems that modern day devices, programs and projects all seem to be stuck in the alpha or beta stage, and Jeff Bezo’s is taking a fairly similar stance with Alexa:

The project has been important to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who signed off on using the company’s customers as guinea pigs, one of the people said. Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.

Translation: Thank you for beta testing the future!

The privacy implications may be even messier. Consumers might not realize that some of their most sensitive conversations are being recorded by Amazon’s devices, information that could be highly prized by criminals, law enforcement, marketers and others. On Thursday, Amazon said a “human error” let an Alexa customer in Germany access another user’s voice recordings accidentally.

Right now the only “human error” that I see is owning one of these if you value your privacy. Again, this would be another case where I would look at building my own, or at the very least hack these devices if applicable.