The Creepiest Things That People's Smart Home Systems and Alexas Have Ever Done

In October of 2014, two Cincinnati, Ohio parents were startled to hear some unexpected sounds coming from the Internet-enabled baby monitor in their 10 month old daughter’s bedroom. They awoke at midnight to the sound of a man screaming and at one point even yelling, “Wake up, baby!” They discovered the voice was coming from the monitor itself. 

Upon checking the monitor’s camera from a cell phone, they saw that it was moving independently. When the father ran into his daughter’s bedroom to check on her, the camera turned directly towards him and began yelling obscenities until he unplugged it from the wall. 

Tech experts claimed that wireless IP cameras such as the one that the family used are fairly easy to hack into, leaving many consumers feeling unsafe and violated.

There have been many accounts of Alexa bursting into unprompted laughter or spouting out random sentences, but sometimes her contributions skew a bit more to the horrifying end of the spectrum. In a New York Times article published in February 2018, Farhad Manjoo shares the story of how his Alexa terrified him and his wife as they were settling into bed one night.

With no prompting from either person, Alexa’s blue ring lit up, indicating that she had heard her “Alexa” command. She then proceeded to emit what Manjoo described as a “wail, like a child screaming in a horror-movie dream.” After hearing about the incident, an Amazon employee offered to investigate, but clarified that they had never heard of Alexa doing such a thing. In fact, they didn’t even think Alexa was capable of making that kind of sound. 

Needless to say, Manjoo and his wife were unnerved, but elected to keep Alexa for the convenience, despite her occasional nightmarish conversation starters.

Shortly after Alexa made its debut, users began complaining of random laughing coming from the device. Sometimes, Alexa laughed in response to jokes or words like "lamp," easily mistake for "laugh," while other times the device would cackle in the middle of the night or in a quiet room. One user even claimed Alexa laughed when he told her she was freaking him out. An article from The Guardian reported in March 2018 that Amazon acknowledged the issue in a statement that said, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.” 

If it helps, Alexa doesn’t know why she’s laughing either. One Twitter user mentioned in the article claimed that Alexa would begin laughing during office conversations. When asked why, she would simply respond, “Sorry, I am not sure.” If she is planning to take over the world, at least she’s only in the planning stages. 

When Rachel Metz was looking through her Alexa history one day, she discovered something surprising. Her device had been listening to and recording private conversations within her home. Metz stated, “It’s heard me complain to my dad about something work-related, chide my toddler about eating dinner, and talk to my husband—the kinds of normal, everyday things you say at home when you think no one else is listening.”

These findings led her to write an article for the MIT Technology Review, which was posted in May 2018 and was appropriately titled, “Yes, Alexa is recording mundane details of your life, and it’s creepy as hell.” 

Not surprisingly, many reddit posters felt validated in the technological cynicism they already harbored, with some even giving advice to Rachel on how to trip up the all-seeing eye that they believe the Amazon Echo system to be. 

As soon as we began inviting what is essentially AI into our homes, there was talk of the potential for widespread abuse. One study covered in the New York Times in May 2018 showed the alarming capabilities of Alexa. The article describes a study conducted by students from UC Berkeley and Georgetown University in which they discovered that they could hide commands in white noise or YouTube videos to get the device to do things like open a website or turn on airplane mode.

As the frequencies used to communicate these commands are outside of a human’s hearing range, commands could even be embedded into recordings of music or spoken text. While the devices themselves are not responsible for these hidden messages, the study does demonstrate how anyone with an unsavory agenda could exploit the accessibility of someone’s home system. One of the authors of the study stated, “My assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do.”

A May 2018 news article reported that a Portland family's Alexa recorded private conversations within their home. Then, without being asked or notifying the family, it sent these conversations to one of their contacts in Seattle. The contact who received the audio was an employee of a family member. After receiving the audio, she immediately contacted them and advised them to “unplug your Alexa devices right now.”

Upon being contacted about the incident, Amazon apologized profusely to the family and released a statement detailing what they believed took place, saying, "We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence.” Even so, the company refused to offer the family a refund for their devices.