Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

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1. Yes, I meant the Beauty and the Beast ad. They describe how "it invites our partners to be our guest and shares their tales." That's their actual explanation: this product is how Google invites THEIR guests into YOUR home. If that's honestly what you want, by all means. But not in my house.

2. Right, Home was found to be recording thousands of times a day. Google quickly shipped a software update to disable it: that's the right damage control, and they deserve credit for that response.

But the point is that Google will happily "spy on everything I said" and not notice. Why should a random reporter have to dig through Google codenames to discover this spying? Shouldn't Google have safeguards in place? And see their pathetic response [1] that doesn't acknowledge the true problem at all.

Google could own these mistakes. But instead they deny their ads are ads, and characterize constant eavesdropping as "touch controls behaving incorrectly." They haven't learned a thing, and until they do, this stuff is going to happen again and again with their products.

[1] https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7550221

I'm sorry but you're either being intentionally obtuse or trying to twist and mislead people by spreading stories out of context and lacking crucial information.

1. In over two years the Home existing, that happened a SINGLE time, no money changed hands and once they realize it people didn't enjoy the experience, it never happened again.

Reading your original comment

> Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information

you make it sounds like this is something they do regularly all the time. It literally happened once a year ago and they apologized for it.

2. This was a hardware defect on a very very small number of units on a single type of smart speaker. The defect triggered the button at the top, which makes the speaker lights up, listen and tries to respond, so the user would clearly see it misbehaving. All recordings also show up on your activity page.

Again here, your original comment:

> Google Home was found to be listening all the time

You make it sound like his happened on all devices, was doing it intentionally and was doing it in an undisclosed secret way, when in fact it was a bug which realistically affected less than 0.00001% of the people and was fixed within a few hours once reported.

You can bend the truth and assume whatever crazy tinfoil theory you want, but that doesn't make it reality.

The problem with all those tech companies about their "mistakes" is that they lost the benefit of the doubt long ago.

Remember when Google scooped up unsecured WiFi data via their creepy street view vehicles?

Yeah, that was a mistake by some mid-level manager and not intentional.

Don't even get me started on Facebook's "mistakes".

It's only a mistake if they get caught.

Exactly!

No if your using freely broadcast info to help with geolocation harvesting it all on the vehicle and processing to extract the info you want centrally is the optimal way to do it.

If Google promised to not inject more ads into My Day, I'd give them a break. But they did the opposite, committing to "continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users."

Regarding unexpectedly recording users: even if only one user was affected, the issue is that Google didn't show contrition. They characterized the problem as "touch controls behaving incorrectly" and did not acknowledge the privacy violation, except indirectly.

There's no conspiracy required here, the logic is very simple. Google is not losing money on these devices for fun.

How is literally driving to the house of the person affected 30m after receiving the email and replacing the broken device "not showing remorse"? I honestly don't understand HN sometimes, do you want them to literally lie about what happened? It was a hardware bug, and they literally had to cripple the device and disable touch control for every single device out there, to avoid this happening again, even though realistically it was only 0.001% of the devices that were affected. But again, they didn't take a chance and completely disabled that feature. Yet apparently that's "not shownig any remorse"...

As for ads, again, who cares what they said, actions is what matters. There hasn't been any other content like that since then.

Google Now probably does the same thing, but it's still incredibly useful.

1. This doesn't mean it will never happen again, or in other contexts (not "My Day").

2. Google still has the capacity to do it, and sure, this was a mistake, but just like Android records people's location by default, in the future google could decide for an opt-out feature that records for the sake of training ML, analytics, or some feature.

This is not about tinfoil conspiracies, this is simply caring about privacy. The vast majority of people in the US weren't directly affected by the NSA's espionage, but still there was public outcry because people like privacy.

If this guy/girl thinks it's better to be safe than sorry, let her/him do so. No need to get so defensive of Google.

EDIT: A downvote? I'm curious as to why (especially given there was no reply).

Sure, a lot of things /could/ happen, but my issue in particular was that the original comment was (intentionally or not) misleading people to believe something that was very far from reality.

As it is, they don't have ads and they don't record without consent. You could argue all day about what they could or would do in the future, but I will reconsider my decision to use he device then. Let's get the facts about how the product works now straight for now.

> As it is

What makes you apparently think

1) the current state of affairs is good enough coming from anyone in the BigCorp top10, particularily those already involved un data collection as core business?

2) future iterations on any of [hardware, software, business goals] will be conform to currently reasonable expectation of use from the general public ?

I mean we're talking about a corp that has internalised "Bait and Switch" as core business model..

the person you're responding to appears to be a google employee who regularly comments pro-google statements in these type of threads, trying to paint google in a positive light.

"didn't enjoy the experience"

This is newspeak. I am going to go up to someone in the street, put my hand in their pocket and when they don't enjoy the experience, I'll act all apologetic and surprised, kind of sad that they didn't enjoy the experience, but of course respecting their wishes and I would totally not try something similar in the future (except maybe their other pocket?) because I'm not at all a bad citizen just looking out for the shareholders ok?

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