Google’s latest privacy mess
“The paranoid nightmare of a voice assistant spying on you is no longer a theoretical,” said Eric Limer in PopularMechanics.com. Earlier this month, tech blogger Artem Russakovskii was given a premarket Google Home Mini smart speaker to review. The device, which went on sale this week for $49, is Google’s answer to the popular Amazon Echo, using voice-activated artificial intelligence to let users check the weather, play music, adjust smart thermostats and lightbulbs, and more. After a couple of days, Russakovskii noticed the Mini “behaving weirdly”; even when he hadn’t activated the device by saying “OK Google” or tapping the button on top, the gadget appeared to be turning on all the time, and even reacting to TV programs. That’s when Russakovskii checked his Home Mini’s logs: The device had been “eavesdropping on him 24/7 and sending all its recordings home to Google.” The company blamed a faulty top button for the self-activation, said Dave Smith in BusinessInsider.com. But the problem clearly wasn’t limited to Russakovskii’s gadget, because the company has since disabled the top buttons on all Home Minis. This spying “fiasco,” coming just as the devices hit the market, is clearly “a black eye for Google’s smart-home efforts.”
The fast-growing market for digital home assistants “needed something like the Google Home Mini disaster to happen,” said Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg.com. Naysayers who have warned of the dangers of putting such devices in our homes are routinely dismissed as paranoid; Russakovskii, before his own incident, admitted to calling such doubters “tinfoil-hat wearers.” But these gadgets are designed to listen all the time, and they don’t have to be defective for spying to occur. Recording can be triggered “by a hack, an accidental noise, a software glitch.” And this is not a problem that threatens a small number of tech enthusiasts. This year, 36 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant device. “What happened to Russakovskii merely confirms Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Even without spying, Google’s smart-home speaker will have access to a “gold mine” of personal data on you, said April Glaser in Slate.com. It will know “when you wake up, what items you need around the house, the music you like, how many other people live at your house, your eating habits, and more.” Is the convenience of hearing whether it’s going to rain or being able to turn off a lamp with your voice really worth giving up all that information to a company that made $79 billion last year on digital ads? “I’d be shocked if the company doesn’t find some way to leverage the data it collects about customers in the privacy of the home to help advertisers better target people.” The more I think about it, “I’m cool just dimming the lights myself.”