Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Uneasy smart-home inhabitants have long wondered whether their obliging devices are quietly eavesdropping on their private conversations. After all, if your smart speaker is listening for its wake word, doesn't that mean it's always listening? Now people's paranoia appears to have been confirmed--and then some--with Seattle local news station KIRO 7 reporting that a Portland family's Echo recorded their private conversation and then sent it, as an audio file, to someone in their contact list. A former smart-home enthusiast, named only as Danielle, told KIRO 7 that she and her husband recently received a call from her husband's employee in Seattle, telling them to unplug their Echo immediately.

In case you needed another reminder that Amazon's Echo, an internet-connected recording device designed to listen and respond to verbal commands, can pose security and privacy risks for you and your loved ones, here you go. A family in Portland, Oregon contacted the company recently to ask it to investigate why the device had recorded private conversations in their home and sent the audio to a person in another state. The family did as told, after the employee told them about receiving an audio file containing what seemed like a private conversation. At first the family did not believe the employee, but then the employee was able to relay details of the private conversation. "My husband and I would joke and say I'd be these devices are listening to what we're saying," a woman named Danielle, who didn't want her last name used, told KIRO-TV in Portland.