{"id":24952,"date":"2021-03-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aleksawn.bget.ru\/7-sluchaev-kogda-umnaya-kolonka-mogla-prichinit-vred-cheloveku\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T11:25:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T08:25:53","slug":"7-times-a-smart-speaker-could-harm-a-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bukvaved.top\/en\/7-sluchaev-kogda-umnaya-kolonka-mogla-prichinit-vred-cheloveku\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Cases When a Smart Speaker Could Have Harmed a Person"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Smart speakers are gradually becoming an integral part of modern life. They can control other smart devices in your home, tell your children a story, play your favorite playlist, and do hundreds of other useful things.<\/p>\n

However, sometimes this assistant turns from a person's best friend into a hidden enemy. Here are the top 7 cases where a smart speaker could have harmed a person with its actions.<\/p>\n

The most well-known cases involve the Amazon Echo speaker, popular in the West, which features Alexa, the smart assistant. This is the one we'll be covering in this article. If you've had any funny or scary experiences with Alexa or other smart speakers, please share them in the comments.<\/p>\n

1. Ordering unnecessary goods<\/h2>\n

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Children and TV presenters are unintentionally causing smart speakers to "go" to expensive stores. In 2017, a six-year-old girl from Texas accidentally ordered an expensive toy after asking the family's Amazon Echo to play with it.<\/p>\n

"Can you play dollhouse with me and give me a dollhouse?" the child asked. Alexa granted the girl's wish, ordering a Sparkle Mansion dollhouse for $170, along with almost two kilograms of cookies.<\/p>\n

CW6 News in San Diego decided to cover the story. During the broadcast, anchor Jim Patton joked, "I love that little girl who said, 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.'".<\/p>\n

After the show, several viewers contacted CW6 News to report that the host's comment had prompted them to order dollhouses from Alex. Fortunately, none of the orders were fulfilled.<\/p>\n

2. Mocking and bullying living Alexes<\/h2>\n

For the average user, the Amazon Echo is a useful and effective device. But some people are bringing the virtual assistant's functions to real people.<\/p>\n

Six-year-old Alexa from Massachusetts is constantly bullied by other children because of her name. Children at school treat her like a servant, demanding that she do their homework and ridicule her. The bullying has become such a problem that Alexa's mother, Lauren, wrote to Jeff Bezos asking him to change the bot's name.<\/p>\n

Young Alexa isn't the only person with that name to be confused with the smart speaker. One Reddit thread received over 1,300 comments from women named Alexa, complaining about the number of unoriginal jokes they receive. "For some reason, people think they're the most creative and witty people in the world," wrote one user, adding that she wants to "kill Amazon and their stupid robot.".<\/p>\n

3. Creepy statements that frighten owners<\/h2>\n

Sean Kinnear of San Francisco, USA, claimed Alexa scared him to death. He was walking from the kitchen to the living room when his Echo smart speaker abruptly declared, "Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying." When Sean instructed Alexa to repeat the statement, it failed to do so and instead reported errors.<\/p>\n

Sean said his home isn't integrated into a smart home system, and his family occasionally uses his Echo speaker to check sports scores and weather conditions. He also reported that his Amazon Prime Video subscription was suspended after Alexa made a statement about dying people.<\/p>\n

Sometimes Alexa has the best intentions, but it backfires. User Rigann Mooradian reported that she was once sitting, listening to music and crying over being fired from her job, when she heard a voice say, "Everything will be okay." These words might have been comforting had they come from someone other than Alexa. Rigann immediately unplugged the smart speaker and stuffed it in a drawer.<\/p>\n

"I thought, hey, this is not normal. She shouldn't be doing this," Muradian added.<\/p>\n

4. Recommendation for breaking the 6th commandment<\/h2>\n

Amazon programmers use machine learning to teach Alexa everyday speech, including jokes. When someone asks an unfamiliar question, the artificial intelligence processes the request and then searches the internet for an answer.<\/p>\n

But Alexa's AI has a habit of encountering offensive comments on Reddit. And it turns out that toxic content has a negative effect on the immature artificial brain.<\/p>\n

In 2017, for example, a smart speaker instructed one user to kill his adoptive parents. The recipient was horrified. In a scathing online review, he described the experience as "a whole new level of creepy.".<\/p>\n

Do you think Alexa could evolve into Skynet from the Terminator movies?<\/p>\n

5. Sending telephone messages to third parties<\/h2>\n

After recording a phone conversation between a US couple, Alexa forwarded it to a third party without the owners' permission. The manufacturer attributed the incident to a "rare coincidence." Allegedly, the smart assistant heard a word in the conversation that resembled its name and then picked up something resembling a "send message" command.<\/p>\n

By asking "Who," the smart speaker recognized the name of a person in the conversation who was in the owner's contacts and then checked to see if it was correct. The electronic ears heard something like "correct," after which Alexa sent the message to the recipient.<\/p>\n

<\/span>6. Broadcasting adult content to children<\/h2>\n

Sometimes an innocuous request for a children's song can lead the smart assistant to start a conversation about things not suitable for children's ears.<\/p>\n

A family who received an Amazon Echo Dot for Christmas experienced a curious incident. Their young son wanted to hear his favorite song. So he grabbed the device with both hands and asked Alexa to "play Digger Digger." But instead of playing the desired song, the device started offering the young user a list of adult categories.<\/p>\n

7. Deadly Advice<\/h2>\n

Paramedic Danny Morritt asked Alexa to explain the heart cycle. Instead, the device began ranting about the evil nature of humanity and how it was destroying our planet.<\/p>\n

The bizarre broadcast ended with the columnist telling Morritt: \u00ab"Make sure you kill yourself by stabbing yourself in the heart for the greater good."\u00bb<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The manufacturer conducted an investigation, and it turned out that the device had read a Wikipedia article to its owner. Archives show that in June 2019, someone edited the relevant page of the online encyclopedia to include the message. For some reason, the virtual assistant decided to use the text from an older version of the site.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Do smart speakers spy on users?<\/h2>\n

As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being spied on. And many information security experts confirm that, yes, smart speakers can spy on their owners.<\/p>\n

They can become a tool for stealing personal information, and even disabling the built-in microphone won't protect you from eavesdropping. After all, any speaker can act as a microphone, as Alexander Tokarenko, a representative of the Association of Heads of Information Security Services, pointed out on Sputnik Radio.<\/p>\n

And according to a joint study by Northeastern University and Imperial College London, not only smart speakers, but also smart TVs and even internet-connected smart doorbells can transmit their owners' data to third parties.<\/p>\n

The large-scale study involved 81 popular smart gadget models from various manufacturers. A total of 34,586 experiments were conducted, revealing that 72 devices sent data to someone other than the manufacturer.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2019, Google acknowledged that its employees were analyzing commands users gave to the Google Home smart speaker. A statement posted on the company's website stated that audio recordings were being used for speech analysis to improve language recognition.<\/p>\n

However, this doesn't mean you should avoid buying a smart speaker. Reputable people, and we believe they make up the majority of smart device users, have nothing to fear (except perhaps targeted advertising). If you're concerned that your smart assistant might be listening in the background, simply turn off the speaker when not in use.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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