When a bot shares your name: how Amazon made girls called Alexa a target of teasing and even sexual harassment
- The popularity of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is causing problems for girls with the same name
- Parents of the victims of teasing, jokes and even sexual harassment, have to decide whether to change their names
The moment Jennifer Clark realised that Amazon’s Alexa was ruining her eight-year-old daughter’s life was in July when her kid came home from Bible camp, an experience the child had been looking forward to for months.
“I happened to have Amazon open on my laptop and was shopping. She saw the name Alexa on my screen,” Clark recalls, referring to an ad for the Amazon Echo device. Her daughter said, “‘That’s my name. I don’t like it. They are always teasing me’,” Clark says.
“‘They are always pretending I’m the Alexa machine.’ And she started crying. I don’t know how long she was holding onto it,” Clark says.
It was a heartbreaking moment for Clark, but even so, she didn’t realise the full extent of what her daughter was going through as a result of sharing a name with Amazon’s popular software bot, Alexa. The Amazon smart speaker device that features Alexa was released in 2014, when the child was three, and no one knew then what a worldwide phenomenon it would become.
At first, Clark, who is an educator with a background in child development, just put the camp teasing story down to kids being kids.
But then she started to pay attention and saw the relentless nature of the teasing. It wasn’t just the kids at camp. It was kids and adults everywhere: the kids at school, her daughter’s teacher, adults at the store if Clark called out her daughter’s name, and so on.