They’re always listening. They’re on the internet. But what happens when digital assistants like Alexa go rogue? Could they share our private conversations without our consent? Privacy advocates have long warned this could happen, and now it has.

A woman in Portland, Ore., told KIRO7, a television news station in Washington, that her Amazon Echo device had recorded a conversation then shared it with one of her husband’s employees in Seattle.

Skeptics were quick to say we told you so, as the news rocketed through the connected world.

Now, Amazon says it knows what happened: As the woman, identified only as Danielle, chatted away with her husband, the device’s virtual assistant, Alexa, mistakenly heard a series of requests and commands to send the recording as a voice message to one of the husband’s employees.

“Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa,’” Amazon said in a statement. “Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”