It was truly a bizarre experience. First we noticed a random intermittent ringing noise in the house and couldn’t figure out what it was. We tracked it down to the Alexa but since there are no logs or notifications we didn’t know what had just happened. It seems the person hung up when they heard us looking around so we never saw any visible indication that anything was happening.

Once we figured it out, we then had to spend half a day going through the Alexa documentation (useless) and random threads on Reddit to figure out how the access control for this feature and Alexa in general works. Like I said, certain changes to your account cannot be made without contacting support and being escalated to a certain team. By the end of it I still could not be certain we had locked this person out because of the number of changes they had made to the account and how much of a mess the app is.

The thing I really don’t understand is that this feature has been deployed for over a year and has received negative attention in the press. It’s just unbelievable that they would ship a feature that can turn your Alexa into a listening device and not think through what could go wrong, and never revisit it in a year.