Alexa Really is Listening

Something happened this morning that made me angry, nervous, and seriously creeped out.  I want to tell you about it, but first here's a little background.

Back in 2015 or early 2016 I bought an Amazon Echo when they first came out.  We still have the same one.  In case you're not familiar with the Echo, it's a small cylinder shaped electronic device that you use to access Alexa, Amazon's personal assistant.  Once it's set up you can give it voice commands by saying things like "Alexa, what's the weather for today?" or "Alexa, set a timer for 40 minutes" or "Alexa, what's the news for today?"  You can ask it just about anything and usually it can give you a pretty reasonable answer.

Alexa works by using your Amazon login to access all the voice processing programs and search facilities running in the Amazon data centers worldwide.  As soon as you plug it in and link it to your Amazon account it instantly knows a lot about you.  You can enable ordering on Amazon and tell it things like "Alexa, reorder toilet paper" or "Alexa, add whole wheat flour to my shopping list."  It already knows everything you have ever ordered from Amazon and you can reorder those items with just one voice command.  At first it was just a curiosity, but eventually we started to use it for small tasks like kitchen timers, getting the weather for today, or finding the capital of Montana.

At the time we bought the Echo this was pretty amazing technology to have in your home.  I decided to find out how it works.  Basically, the Echo listens for a wake-up word and then sends the audio of whatever comes next to the voice recognition systems running at Amazon before sending your command to whatever needs to act on it for you.  The wake-up word for the Echo is "Alexa."  As soon as you say Alexa it lights up a blue bar at the top of the device and listens for whatever comes next.  After your command has been processed by Amazon a result is sent back to the Echo and a friendly female voice tells you the result.  Pretty simple stuff when you think of it, but it's not quite that cut and dried.

As soon as the Echo with Alexa was introduced there were concerns about privacy.  Amazon assured everyone that they were not capturing all the conversations happening in your home and sending them to their data centers.  The said that the only time Alexa is listening to you is when you say the wake-up word.

That's reassuring but it's impossible if you really think about it.  Alexa has to be listening to everything constantly in order to listen for the wake-up word.  There's no way around that.  For nine years now people have been suspicious of Alexa.  Amazon has vehemently insisted that Alexa was not actively listening to us all the time.  What happened this morning says something entirely different.

This morning we were sitting in our living room having some morning coffee.  My wife was browsing through Facebook on her phone and saw an ad for a sale at a company called Sak.  There was a purse she was interested in.  Alexa was in the next room and within earshot.  She mentioned that she really liked a particular purse and she showed me a picture of it on her phone.  We discussed it for a minute while she rationalized the purchase.

Now a little more background for you.  I have never ordered anything from Sak.  I have never even visited their web site.  As far as I know I have never ordered a purse online.  We have separate computers and our own phones and she has never used any of my devices to communicate with Sak.  I don't have any connection whatsoever with Sak.  Alexa uses my Amazon account, but my wife has never asked Alexa a question about Sak or even about purses in general.  My wife has her own Amazon account and never uses mine.

What happened next was truly creepy.  My wife got up to go refill her coffee and I immediately received an email from Sak telling me about their sale.  Remember, I have no connection of any kind with Sak.  I think my odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of a company I have never had any contact with before sending me a random email about the very sale my wife and I had just been discussing.

I thought about it for a minute and I came to the conclusion that Alexa really is listening all the time and is parsing what she hears into marketing leads for Amazon to sell.  Think about it for a minute.  Amazon could make a lot of money sending sales leads gleaned from supposedly private conversations to various companies who sell the products being discussed.  That, combined with all the information that Amazon already knows about us, would be very valuable.

An even more troubling scenario would be if, instead of sales leads, they were parsing random discussions about a crappy president or a discussion of how we wish a big meteor would land in Washington and take out the capitol or the White House.  A government agency could subpoena this data and use it to proactively suppress people who were perceived as unfriendly to the current administration.  It could happen and Amazon would most likely just hand over everything rather than getting into a legal pissing match with a President with the maturity of a seventh grader and the mental capacity of a houseplant.

What happened this morning has really made me think.  I'm angry that Amazon has apparently lied to us.  I'm nervous that it's possible that the government already has knowledge of the many private conversations had between us and our friends.  I'm leaning strongly toward unplugging our Echo and landfilling it, but that raises the question "What if Alexa is innocent and it was really the blender? Or the TV? Or maybe even the microwave?"  All I know is that one of our devices ratted us out and I think it's most likely Alexa.

UPDATE 3/26/25

Amazon announced last week that Alexa enabled devices would be storing EVERYTHING they hear to the Amazon cloud and that information would be used to train their large model AI system.  Alexa will no longer wait to hear its alert word before starting to process what it hears.  Now it will capture everything it hears and send it to the cloud.  Everything.

After hearing them admit what I already suspected, I unregistered all of our Alexa enabled devices and powered them down.  This morning I watched the city's garbage collectors dump them into their garbage truck and haul them all away with our kitchen trash and everything else we threw away last week.  My next step will be to wean myself off Amazon completely over the course of the next few months.