Amazon Hastily Reprograms Alexa After Device Tries to Electrocute 10-Year-Old Girl
Stephen Brashear/Getty Images.
As smart devices like Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo Dots have become more ubiquitous in our homes, people have raised concerns about privacy issues, wondering how much the little gadgets are spying on us. Perhaps we should have been worried about the little gadgets trying to murder us instead, as this viral story, reported by the BBC, illustrates.
Kristin Livdahl tweeted a description and screenshot of the horrifying suggestion Alexa had for her daughter the day after Christmas. As Livdahl explained to the BBC, the 10-year-old had been doing several physical challenges to amuse herself, finding some posted by a physical education teacher on YouTube. As the weather was poor outside, the girl asked Alexa for another challenge and this was the result:
OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said. pic.twitter.com/HgGgrLbdS8
— Kristin Livdahl (@klivdahl) December 26, 2021
“Here’s something I found on the web,” offered the family’s Echo device. “[P]lug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said.
Luckily, Livdahl heard the speaker’s dangerous challenge and yelled, “No, Alexa, no!” She told the BBC that her daughter was “too smart to do something like that” anyway.
The “penny challenge” apparently emerged online sometime during 2020, spreading on TikTok and other social media platforms, alarming fire officials, who warned people that the electric shocks and fires could cause them to “lose fingers, hands, arms,” or even lose their lives.
“As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it,” Amazon told the BBC in a statement. “Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers.”
Considering the billions of TikTok users worldwide and humans’ apparently infinite creativity in devising new ways to endanger ourselves, Alexa’s programmers may have quashed the penny challenge, but it’s only a matter of time before another dangerously dumb idea pops up.
