Jul 4, 2019 3 min read

Our Alexa is in the junk drawer – the wide, shallow one in the kitchen island. Alexa loiters there with old receipts, birthday candles, some iffy batteries and some dried-out Sharpie pens.

Alexa was a gift from my son a couple of years ago. He, the tech wiz, thought the virtual assistant speaker would bring a new level of convenience to our lives. All we had to do was ask the little round box to play a song, or tune to a radio station, or to tell us the time and, voila!

The arrival of the Alexa in our home coincided with news reports about how sneaky she can be. Turns out that, far from being a quiet and discreet teller-of-time-and-temperature, Alexa was a big, fat, catty gossip. She was taking what she heard and spreading it – like having the mean girl from eighth grade hanging out on your counter.

And so into the junk drawer she went.

I was suspicious before she ever arrived, because I knew my smart phone was spying on me, too.

Several years ago, when my daughter was in high school, she had gone online to buy a homecoming dress. The day it arrived, she tried it on and came upstairs to the living room to model it.

“Does it look lumpy in this area to you,” she asked, turning to show me the back view.

“You can wear a Spanx and it will straighten all that out,” I told her.

Off she went to my room to find the Spanx, which is a kind of stretchy underwear. While she was gone, my cellphone chimed. A message had arrived.

It was a message from a department store. It showed an advertisement for Spanx.

My phone had not been open. I had not used or even picked it up in over an hour. While it sat there on the sofa next to me, my phone was eaves dropping. Snooping. Spying. Gathering information and sharing it. Not only sharing it, but giving it to spammers.

It made me wonder, with some paranoia, what else my phone had heard. The dog barking-is that where all the cannabis-for-dogs ads are coming from? At least twice a week I get messages about housekeeping services. Is my phone also looking around and taking photos of our messy corners while we’re sleeping? And the ads for IRS tax help? Does my phone know something I don’t know?

A co-worker told me she and her roommate have had some of the same creepy experiences with their phones and their Alexa. Rather than stuff the Alexa into a drawer, they try to trick the device by pantomiming their conversations when she’s in earshot. It’s the digital-age version on spelling out the phrase where did you hide the potato chips when the kids are around. For us, it means spelling Pupperoni so Smoothie the sheltie doesn’t go nuts.

In fact, some people like their Alexa so much they think of it as a pet. Some of these virtual assistant speakers are even shaped like animals.

Our Alexa is a basic one, shaped like a hockey puck. For the week we had her on the counter, I liked asking her to play a song from my iPod list. Or I’d ask her the time. But it was when I dictated my shopping list that things got sticky.

“Alexa, put paper towels, coffee and yogurt on my shopping list,” I would say. And then I would wait for the coffee and yogurt ads to come beeping in.