After Amazon Echo misfire, ways to protect your own privacy

NEW YORK – Revelations that an Amazon Echo smart speaker inadvertently sent a family's private conversation to an acquaintance highlights some unexpected risks of new voice-enabled technologies. According to Amazon, the fault was an "unlikely" series of inadvertent vocal cues that triggered the speaker, caused it to begin recording and then led it to interpret subsequent conversation as a "send message" request. There is no way to eliminate these sorts of privacy risks short of unplugging entirely. Kill the mic: Most smart speakers have a physical button to disable the microphone, so a private conversation can't be recorded to begin with. You can hit that when you are having sensitive conversations.