[From the last episode: We looked at a review of what we’ve talked about since the beginning of the year.]

Today we do an off-cycle posting due to a late-breaking story that relates to our recent discussion of the Big 3 – notably, Amazon. They’ve had a rather embarrassing problem with one of their customers.

I know plenty of people that are afraid that their phones or other devices are secretly recording all of their conversations and using them to inform advertisers. Supposedly this isn’t happening, if everything is working right. At least not yet.

So imagine how you would feel if someone you know – say, an employee – called you and said, “Dude, you need to unplug your Alexa. You’ve been hackedThis can mean a couple things. A quick-and-dirty (but not elegant) trick to get something done is a hack. A computer security break-in is also a hack (because inelegant tricks are used to break in). It can be a noun or a verb ("he hacked my computer").!” And the reason he called is because he received a text from Alexa including part of a conversation you were having with your wife about nothing in particular – and, particularly, nothing that would be Alexa’s business.

Yes, they found an Alexa bug. Alexa grabbed a part of a conversation and texted it to someone on the contacts list. The device owners were unaware until they got the phone call.

Alexa Perplexa

Amazon has confirmed the glitch, although they haven’t said specifically what caused it. The theory is that Alexa misinterpreted part of the conversation as a command to send a text. But, as far as the couple are concerned, Alexa never gave any of the prompts that the Amazon help page say would happen under normal circumstances.

As you can imagine, the couple have unplugged their Alexa devices – they had several in their home.

What does this tell us? Well, it’s a simple reminder that technology isn’t perfect. When we hand significant life duties over to technology, things will go wrong. It’s happened with self-driving cars; it’s now happened with Alexa (and not the first glitch); and it will happen again.

Does that mean we should drop our devices and run for the hills? Nah, not necessarily. We need to go in eyes-open and not give too much control to technology. And believe me, technology wants control. So by all means, tech up your life. But don’t hand everything over, and don’t forget how to do things the old-fashioned way.