Alexa recorded a woman's private conversation and sent it to a random contact

It's every smart home speaker owner's worst nightmare: a private message recorded and sent to a recipient without their knowledge. But that's what happened to a Portland woman, who told CBS News affiliate Kiro-TV that her Amazon Echo recorded an audio clip of her conversation and sent it to a person on her contact list. The woman, who declined to provide her last name to Kiro-TV, said she was alerted to the bug when the recipient of the message -- one of her husband's employees -- called her home to alert her that she'd been "hacked." An initial investigation by an Alexa engineer turned up no leads, according to the woman. But the engineer speculated that the Echo speaker "guessed" the command to send a message via Alexa Voice Messaging without asking for verbal confirmation.