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Comment by buffportion | Hacker News Reader

A cautionary tale: Echo starts recording when it hears the "wake" word ('Alexa' or 'Amazon'), but it can mistake other words or parts of speech for a wake word (for example, consider how close the phrase "he likes her" is to "Alexa"). Browsing through the history I have found snippets of conversations that Echo had no business listening to, and which the recorded subjects certainly did not wish to send to Amazon.

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There was a thread on reddit a while ago about companies that take these logs and parse through them sudo anonymously as well.

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/siri-google-now-cortana-c...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everythi...

I've had Echo ever since it was first released for Prime members. I live in a small studio apartment. Not once has it ever accidentally turned on. Not from me, guests, or the tv.

I've had maybe 3-4 times in the same period, but they were understandable. Like "a mess of" triggered it once. We just laugh and move on. I do think the "always listening" argument has some merit, because it seems to me it must keep a buffer of sound to recognize so that it always catches the "A" part of Alexa. But that's not "always listening to everything", versus "always listening for a very specific initial trigger sound".

Do you have complete tcpdump logs to prove this, or are you assuming it works that way Amazon said so?

What about new versions of the firmware?

You can go to http://echo.amazon.com/ and see the entire history of recordings with the option to delete any.

Why is this hard to understand? The map is not the territory! Any data you didn't record yourself may not be complete.

If you controlled the firmware of a device that surreptitiously records more than it should be recording, would you show those "extra" recordings to the mark nicely chronologically sorted with the legitimate recordings?

If you were a criminal (or government agency) attacking these devices with bad firmware or buffer overrun, would you have even the slightest care about making sure echo.amazon.com is updated to show your eavesdropping?

// only five karmas and a username that is a googlewhack (!) bringing up exactly 5 posts and nothing else smells a bit like JTRIG

...I guess i just misunderstood the nature of your question. Yeah there's no way to tell if the history is everything they send or just the commands it heard. But at least it's something. Guess you're looking for something more along the lines of this type stuff

https://www.piettes.com/hacking-alexa-the-new-amazon-echo/

http://echo.amazon.com/js/eb25f-app.min.js

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...

But who knows. they could still be hiding stuff. time will tell

// TIL about JTRIG. neat! HN wouldn't let me use TravCav. Search that if you're curious.

I'd heard that users can see a complete history of all commands "heard" by Alexa. I was also told that you can "delete" entries from this history (similar to cleaning your browser history). Is that true, and is that the history you're referring to?

Although it doesn't undo the creepyness of an always-on microphone picking up your conversations, it's an interesting way for Amazon to mitigate that.

Yes, you can list (and listen to) your Echo voice command history, and delete them. Frustratingly, there is no bulk delete that I have found - you have to go through them individually.

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