Alexa startled a stranger

Imagine you’ve bought a vehicle with an Alexa skill. It’s literally the bleak mid-winter and you’ve decided that this skill is essential to your personal well-being because it allows you to start your vehicle without experiencing that first morning chill as you breath in freezing air.

Flash forward five years and you’ve just traded in your Alexa-enabled vehicle for another Alexa-enabled vehicle. As with the old vehicle, you’ve enabled the Alexa skill and you enjoy avoiding that vehicle warmed without the shock of frozen nasal passages so you say “Alexa, tell (vehicle manufacturer) to start my (vehicle model)”. But for some reason Alexa misunderstands and says “Ok, (old vehicle manufacturer) has started your (old vehicle model)”

What just happened? Clearly an old skill wasn’t properly disabled. But what’s the actual impact? Was the old vehicle actually started or did the new owner of the old vehicle deregister your name when they registered their name and associated it with that VIN? Since you obviously can’t see the vehicle or the current owner, there are several unanswerable questions like: did the vehicle actually start? What happened when it started (likely unexpectedly)? What were the impacts of the erroneous start?

The moral of this story is to disable any unnecessary Alexa apps and skills. Obviously having any AI in your own personal ecosystem is a choice, but making sure that you clean up after yourself when life situations change is theme as old as time; but it’s especially relevant as we deepen our relationship with integrated technologies.