People are being warned to keep Amazon Echo and Google smart home devices out of their bedrooms and bathrooms.
Experts have issued advice as more of us buy the connected devices - or look forward to getting one for Christmas.
The smart speakers can be a blessing in the bedroom - where they can function as everything from an alarm clock to a radio, a diary to a source of information about news, traffic and weather.
But experts have said the bedroom is not the best place for your device - warning it will be listening to you, and relaying some of its recordings back to real people at HQ- reports Mirror Online.
Dr Hannah Fry said Echos and other similar devices should be kept out of private areas such as the bedroom and bathroom.
Dr Fry, a mathematician and expert on tech company algorithms at University College London, says there is a ‘creep’ of allowing gadgets to invade our privacy, as reported by the Daily Mail .
She said: "I think there are some spaces in your home, like the bedroom and bathroom, which should remain completely private.
"This technology is activated by a trigger word but it keeps recording for a short period afterwards.
"People accept that, but we should all spend more time thinking about what it means for us."
Associate professor Dr Fry asked tech firms to provide all the data they had collected on her, and found recordings of conversations taken inside her home.
She said 'very senior' people in the tech industry won't even take a smartphone into their bedroom.
Earlier this year, Amazon admitted staff listen to customers conversations through Alexa, stating the recordings were used to help improve the Echo device’s understanding of human speech.
A report by news site Bloomberg suggested many users are unaware humans are listening in, with staff each able to review up to 1,000 audio clips a day.
Teams had also shared recordings they found funny in internal chat rooms.
