Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live electrical socket with penny

A child requesting a challenge from an Amazon Alexa device was told to "plug in a phone charger about halfway, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs."

The dangerous search result appeared thanks to something called "the penny challenge" going viral on TikTok sometime in the year prior. Alexa will answer general inquiries with a web search, but there is no guarantee where that result will come from.

"We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a teacher on YouTube earlier," said the child's mother on Twitter. "Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."

According to a reportfrom the BBC, the mother was present and was able to tell Alexa to stop when she heard what it was saying. However, she did assert that her daughter was smart enough to know better than perform such a dangerous task.

OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said. pic.twitter.com/HgGgrLbdS8
— Kristin Livdahl (@klivdahl) December 26, 2021

"Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," said Amazon in a statement. "As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."

Smart assistants like Google and Alexa are well known for having various skills that access information on the mostly unfiltered web. While there seems to be some form of trusted sources for these devices, it is apparent that some bad actors still get through.

52 Comments

kurtvdpoel 1 comment · 3 Years

About 2 years ago

It is physically impossible to insert a plug in a socket and touch the life metal parts, not even with a penny. Plug and socket are constructed that way. Both have to follow strict standards. If both are constructed as imposed by those standards, nothing could happen to the girl.

That’s not to say Alexa should have such a challenge. That’s not acceptable behaviour for a smart speaker. But the little girl was never in danger. Not even when she had done what Alex instructed her to do.

mike_galloway 115 comments · 4 Years

About 2 years ago

kurtvdpoel said:

It is physically impossible to insert a plug in a socket and touch the life metal parts, not even with a penny. Plug and socket are constructed that way. Both have to follow strict standards. If both are constructed as imposed by those standards, nothing could happen to the girl.
That’s not to say Alexa should have such a challenge. That’s not acceptable behaviour for a smart speaker. But the little girl was never in danger. Not even when she had done what Alex instructed her to do.

With modern plugs your probably right, but I just looked in my drawer and found an old plug (probably more than 10 years old but still in good nick) that could be shorted with a penny (need to be an old penny) new pennies are too small but a 10 pence piece would work . This is from a UK perspective - I don't know about other countries.