*By Conor White*
Amazon tried to assure customers Friday that Alexa was not spying on them after it was revealed that one of the company's Echo devices recorded a couple's conversation and sent the audio file to someone in their contacts list without their knowledge.
The incident confirmed the fears of many smart-home skeptics : Big Commerce is listening to their every word.
"Not just Amazon ー Google, Apple, anyone with a smart home assistant who has a privacy issue ー they need to come totally clear about what their privacy policy is for your data," said Andrew Freedman, a senior editor at Tom's Guide. "And right now, they aren't saying 'Oh this is how often Amazon Echo is falsely triggered.' So we don't know these numbers, so it's hard to feel totally safe."
A husband and wife in Portland, Ore., received word that their conversation had been recorded when an employee of the husband told them a recording was sent out. The couple has said they thought it was a joke, but they were convinced when the person was able to tell them that their conversation was about hardwood floors.
Amazon says the Echo device, more commonly known as Alexa, simply got confused, and misinterpreted a series of commands.
"There have been a series of issues before where TV sets have turned on Alexa, or things happen where it just misunderstood what people say," said Freedman. "So what Amazon has to do here is make sure its voice-recognition technology is tight, that it just works, and right now it is clearly not there."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/amazons-unintended-echo).
Seth Schachner, Managing Director at Strat Americas, talks Disney's taking control of Hulu, Warner Bros. and Discovery's split and how if affects the viewers.
The Tony Awards on Sunday lured 4.85 million viewers to CBS, its largest broadcast audience in six years. CBS says Monday that Nielsen data shows the telecast — hosted by “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo — scored a 38% increase over last year’s 3.53 million viewers. That’s the largest audience for the Tonys since 2019, when the telecast that year nabbed 5.4 million viewers and “Hadestown” was crowned best new musical. The latest version also had to compete with the second game of the NBA Finals, between the Thunder and Pacers,
After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple tried to regain its footing Monday during a developers conference that focused mostly on incremental advances and cosmetic changes in its technology.
Six weeks before UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel last December, Luigi Mangione mused about rebelling against “the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel” and expressed that killing the executive “conveys a greedy bastard that had it coming."
