Amazon Alexa Dares 10-Year-Old Girl to Touch Exposed Prongs of Live Plug

Amazon is facing backlash on social media after suggesting a potentially life-threatening “challenge” to a 10-year-old girl.

The girl had asked Alexa to suggest a challenge for her to complete, and the smart speaker instructed her to touch the live prongs of a partially inserted plug.

Alexa directed the young lady to insert a phone charger halfway into a power outlet and then place a coin on the exposed prongs. The incident sparked outrage and concern on social media after the girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, tweeted about it.

The dangerous activity suggested to the girl by Alexa via an Echo smart speaker is known as the “penny challenge” or “outlet challenge,” and it began circulating on social media platforms, including TikTok, about a year ago. Coins are made of metals that conduct electricity well. Inserting them into a live socket can result in electric shocks, fires, and property damage. Amazon stated that it fixed the “error” after learning of the incident.

Many users expressed their shock and anger at how the smart speaker set the girl up to a dangerous activity, with some questioning the evolution of technology behind it.

Another pointed out that Alexa ironically left out the part in the article it referenced to for the “challenge” that warned parents about this viral activity.

Another user questioned the necessity of such a “surveillance tool” in the house.

The mother, Livdahl, stated that her daughter wanted to try some physical challenges that they had previously learned on YouTube, but the weather was bad outside, so the girl wanted to do another one inside their home. The mother then added that Alexa had suggested the challenge she had “found on the Web.”

Following the incident, Amazon said in a statement to the BBC that it had updated Alexa to prevent the voice assistant from recommending such activity in the future, adding that “customer trust is at the heart of everything we do.” “As soon as we were made aware of this error, we took immediate action to correct it,” Amazon said in a statement.

The girl’s mother, too, tweeted yesterday that the challenge had expired.

In another tweet, Livdahl said that this incident made her “go through Internet safety and not trusting things you read without research and verification again”.

In this case, the girl’s mother was on the scene right away to intervene. But we can only imagine the devastation that would have occurred if a parent or guardian had not been present.