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Jeff Bezos explains why you can easily hack a phone, but not Amazon Echo

After Edward Snowden confirmed that phone and computer microphones and cameras can be remotely activated, many people began questioning the blind trust they put in technology. While taking precautions like putting tape over a computer webcam and microphone was initially considered something akin to a tin-foil hat, tons of people do it today, like Mark Zuckerberg for instance. And with good reason: Hackings happen.

Today’s rise of smart home technology has brought increasingly omniscient devices into our living rooms and bedrooms – along with questions of privacy since many of them, like the Amazon’s (AMZN) Echo and its personification Alexa are always listening.

With the microphone always on, waiting for the word “Alexa,” these devices have raised more than a few eyebrows, prompting questions about whether Amazon is spying on people or whether the device could be hacked by third parties.

Speaking at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit 2016, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took these concerns head on while speaking to Walter Isaacson. According to Bezos, the Echo device itself only relays information to the cloud after the wake word has been said—it doesn’t constantly listen and broadcast what people say to the cloud. “That’s why we do the wake word detection locally on board the device,” said Bezos. Constantly broadcasting to the cloud and letting Amazon servers detect the wake word would mean too many potential weak points for security.

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To that point, Bezos says, the Echo is different from those hackable phones and computers.

“If you have a mobile phone in your pocket it has microphones under software control,” said Bezos. “I would posit to you that any nation state worth its salt can put a computer virus on your phone any time they want and listen to everything you say from your cellphone.”

For the Echo, Bezos says Amazon tweaked the phone’s design, adding something unique. ”We actually went one step further than what’s done on a phone. When you hit mute button on Echo, the red ring comes on that says the microphone is turned off. That mute button is connected to the microphone with analog electronics, so you’d have to physically tamper with the device—you couldn’t [hack] it with a computer virus.”

Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumerism, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.

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