Alexa owner Danielle and her husband were sitting at home about two weeks ago when they got a message from one of her husband’s employees who said, “Unplug your Alexa devices right now. You’re being hacked.” From the Dailywire:

Amazon Danielle said, “We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house. At first, my husband was, like, ‘No, you didn’t!’ And the (recipient of the message) said, ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘Oh gosh, you really did hear us.’” Danielle added, “I felt invaded. A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, ‘I’m never plugging that device in again because I can’t trust it.’” Danielle said she unplugged everything, then called Amazon numerous times to investigate. She said, “They said, ‘Our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us; they saw exactly what you said happened, and we’re sorry.’ He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes, and he said, ‘We really appreciate you bringing this to our attention; this is something we need to fix!’”

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Pixabay Danielle concluded, “He told us that the device just guessed what we were saying,” although she said Alexa did not tell her it was going to transmit the recording, which it is supposed to do. So, yes… Alexa recorded this couple’s conversation in their house and randomly sent it to a member of their contact list. In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon said the following: “Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa.’ Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”

Flickr Amazon justifies listening in on conversations so that Alexa can get a better understanding of what users’ voices sound like, so that it will know when it’s being given a command. And yes, these recordings are then stored on Amazon’s servers. Want to see which conversations of yours Amazon’s recorded? Here are the steps via Business Insider: Open the Alexa app on your device. Go to the menu and select “Settings.” Go to the “General” section and select “History.” From here, select a recording and press “Play.”