1. Google and Amazon are pushing these with stupendous discounts, certainly below cost. That tells me that the revenue model is not the hardware. They hope to make money by manipulating me after I buy it. Nope.
2. Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information. Nope.
3. Google Home was found to be listening all the time due to a "hardware flaw." Nope.
4. Amazon devices doing the creepy laugh for no reason? Nope. I mean, come ON.
They couldn't pay me to incorporate one of these things into my living space. It's below-cost hardware running bigcorp-controlled, remotely updatable software intended to extract my info and dollars. Get lost!
2: can you source that please? Only time I ever heard of that was when people thought the bit about a movie coming out was an ad. They said it wasn't a paid thing and was given to people that they thought would enjoy the movie. Personally that's what I want to hear when I ask my home about my day. A reminder that a movie I am interested in is coming out today? Thanks for the reminder!
3: if your referring to the mini that a journalist got and found to be constantly recording small snippets of audio, I thought Google handled that really well. They had someone at his house to collect it the same day I think, and within days disabled the feature across the board even though only a small number of devices had the flaw.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And we are just now starting to figure out that those people were way smarter than those of us who bought into smartphones. Hence even Google pushing the whole "well being" thing this year at I/O. (I've had a smartphone since 2009, but am strongly considering something dumber next time around.)
The corollary of being privacy conscious is NOT being stupid. Folks may be privacy conscious and all power to them to navigate the web/mobile world by making respective choices. However, A LOT of folks are perfectly fine trading off their privacy with convenience and value-add that comes with sharing data with companies (that use the said data to provide better and customized experiences to them). Categorizing people who make these trade offs as less smart is missing the point - and probably cynical since you can't accept them.
One would argue that it’s only because they’ve nothing to lose at the time. I imagine sometimes all the smart motivated people who would never ever run for office or be a public figure of any sort because they’re afraid of their search or post history of their teens or 20s cropping up. I’ll bet it’s actually quite a massive amount. I’m certainly in that boat.
I don't feel dumber. I traded information to Google in exchange for convenience. Now maybe that wasn't worth it to you, but I'd avoid speaking for all of us. My smart phone makes me a functional member of society, that's worth a bit of privacy.
I can never go back to not having the worlds map/navigation in the palm of my hand. I would love to go back to a dumb phone if not for the very crucial feature for me.
What if you could have that convenience without trading information? Weather, stock prices, recipes, music, traffic, timers, shopping lists, etc. don't require sharing any of your personal information.
I'm interested in how you think weather or traffic (for example) would work. Would you download all weather and traffic for every location/road on earth? That's quite a lot of data.
Only if we allow ad tech biz to dictate the definition of "functional member." So far they are winning. At one point my mom yelled at me for never checking Facebook, she genuinely thought I was being rude.
This a war of attrition. FOMO is powerful and most people eventually give in. The companies co-opt your friends and family against you. They don't even realize what is happening.
Would you prefer it if it gp had instead said "My computer makes me a functional member of society"?
For many people, the only computer they have is the smart phone, it's how they look for (and apply for jobs), do some banking, check emails and keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues.
I know it's less convenient, but there's dedicated WiFi hotspot devices that exist.
I considered getting a "dumb phone" and one of these devices because in some cases a tablet-style internet-only plan + pay-as-you-go minutes for the odd time I use a phone would be cheaper than a bundled smartphone plan.
At this point saving the $10/month isn't worth the hassle to me though and now I use Slack on my phone so damn much it'd never work :\
Look at the new Nokia 'matrix phone' 8110. It is a dumb phone with some smart features and most notably 4G and WiFi hotspot functionality. At only 80 dollars or so. I am seriously considering getting one just as an experiment
Not at all, those things are mutually exclusive. You can have a device that is useful and makes many facets of your life much better, but is also hurting other parts. You can still keep the former, and try to reduce the impacts of the latter.
If smartphones were completely useless, then we wouldn't actually need well-being features, we would just throw away our phones...
I'm going to keep blatantly promoting the Librem 5 [1], which is designed specifically to address these concerns (not affiliated with them, just a fan).
I'd be careful about promoting vapor as people tend to get annoyed when they don't get their product. If Purism ships, I doubt it will be anything decent. They are absurdly under capitalized for what they are trying to do. I'd love to be wrong but I'd happily bet 5 figs that I'm not.
Why do you say they're "absurdly" under-capitalized? They already make laptops. The phone's hardware seems fairly standard, no risky R&D gambles, and the software is Linux/OSS...
They re-badge laptops that someone else makes. It's not like they have their own factory in China. In this case they are not re-badging, they are building their own phone and phones are considerably harder to make. There are QA processes that require machines that cost >$1M. It puts them into a situation where they have to trust their manufacturer 100% and pray.
Essential spent ~$100M making their phone and they had help from Foxconn and awesome industry connections. $2M isn't gonna cut it.
Why not Android without the Google services, e.g. LineageOS or CopperheadOS? IMO, for the category it targets -- devices for users that have neither the skill nor desire to be their own sysadmin -- Android is technically superior to the usual GNU/Linux stack. GNU/Linux is moving in the right direction with sandboxed Flatpak apps, but Android is already there. Also, Android is a thoroughly mainstream platform. So if you don't want to be a free-software purist, you can run individual proprietary apps, as long as they're available outside the Play Store and don't require Google services. With a GNU/Linux system, unless it can run Android inside a container, you're basically limited to web applications for anything mainstream.
Android is thoroughly insecure, and proprietary apps do not generally work without Google services. Google has successfully convinced, for example, nearly all apps using location, to use Play Location Services instead of Android Location API. Apps tend to just crash out without Play Services.
Even Microsoft, which is Google's direct competitor for all of these services, hilariously depends on Play Services for nearly all of their Android apps. Office, Skype, etc. all will not run on an Android phone without Google.
I have a Windows Mobile phone these days, and for all the jokes about it being dead: I actually have a wider app selection than AOSP users. Android is a proprietary OS, and almost none of it's apps today are compatible with the open source version.
There's always the Amazon Appstore. And with an open-source Android variant, you could restrict apps that demand over-reaching permissions, including the Amazon Appstore itself.
The Amazon Appstore is trash, and many of the apps in it are out of date or outright nonfunctional. When I tried using Skype on my old Android phone, and it required Play Services, I was mystified because it was also available on Amazon.
As it turned out, the Amazon Appstore version was so out of date it just didn't work anymore.
Go ahead and be an unpaid data gathering tool that can be used by bigcorps, those with the right exploit or (even if they don't do now) when ToS changes and that company starts selling your information to the highest bidder.
They profit at your ignorance.
The fact that it will execute commands with your recorded voice should tell you there's a lot of exploits that can happen without your intervention.
If I want a device to start listening I'll go and push a button for it. The always listening stuff is way too big an vulnerability (like an unsecured API into your house).
I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.
> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.
I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.
Your Facebook data, annually, is worth about $12. Your Google data is probably not worth much more.
Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.
Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.
And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.
Corporations do operate primarily based on profits (not entirely, but mostly).
You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.
Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.
It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.
Anyone who believes the American drone program is not unethical has a seriously skewed moral compass, and I would not trust to be in the same room with.
Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.
Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.
First of all, people haven't even come to a consensus on when war itself is ethically justified. It shouldn't surprise anyone that drone warfare, a subset of something we can't come to an ethical consensus on, is a highly debated ethical issue.
It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.
I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.
edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.
You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.
Your first source states in the headline that the drone strikes "kill innocents 90% of the time".
Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".
An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.
Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.
Which is frustrating, I wouldn't blink at paying that much for Facebook if it meant a genuine ad and tracking free experience. I want to be your customer, not your product.
IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.
I exist, and I also need email. Seems like a win-win for me and google. Realistically, what are you afraid of? Like I said if someone wanted to listen to me it would be very boring.
This is why Google's pushing HTTPS Everywhere so hard, just like net neutrality: It eliminates Google's competition in collecting and monetizing data about your viewing.
Google will claim that they make these moves because they care about your privacy, security, and freedom, but malicious tracking scripts they don't do anything about, because that would close off their own profit scheme.
Which competitors will be excluded by the increase in HTTPS? Which companies exactly are relying on the connections being unencrypted, and how are they able to monitor them?
And if Google's competitors are spying on HTTP rather than using tracking scripts, why does seemingly every page I visit load tracking scripts from a bunch of companies?
ISPs. HTTPS Everywhere and net neutrality laws are both endeavors designed to mitigate ISPs from providing ad networks and/or collecting data on Internet usage.
Of course, Google claims they do this for your benefit, but if it was for your benefit, they'd need to stop doing the same things with tracking scripts. This is how you can tell they are pushing these to reduce competition, not to increase your privacy.
In one of the major announcements for Chrome, 'Moving towards a more secure web' (2016-09-08) [1], the Chrome Security Team writes:
"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."
The word 'modify' is a hyperlink to an article titled 'AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection' [2] (ironically, a non-HTTPS site).
This statement both ignores the tremendous effect smartphones have on you personally (as opposed to others being interested in you), and the tremendous effect tech platforms have on large scale groups of unimportant people.
Oh no doubt, and it does so intentionally. A voice assistant in my house effects me and only me. Therefore, I am ok with the privacy/convenience tradeoff because frankly IDK what Google thinks they know about me, but I google way too much random crap to ever put together a half-way decent profile about me and my interests.
Maybe, but HFT have been working a long time to find a pattern in the markets. Human's are random and Sampling can only tell you so much especially when sampling bias is so easy to do accidentally
Humans can be spontaneous yes, but not exactly random. In aggregate, human behavior from online activities is predictable [0] according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies.
To Quote the link you just posted, "Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings. How can you know that you have corrected for every possible factor? Thirdly and finally, the "science" part of "data science" still lacks rigor in my opinion. For instance, a lot of the conclusions the book talks about are based on single studies which don't seem to be repeated. In some cases the sample sizes are large, but in other cases they are small. Plus, people's opinions can change over time, so it's important to pick the right time window in which to do the study. All this points to great responsibility on the part of data scientists to make sure that their results are rigorous and not too simplistic, before they are taken up by both politicians and the general public as blunt instruments to change social policies. This responsibility increases especially as these approaches become more widespread and cheaper to use, especially in the hands of non-specialists. When you are in possession of a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail." - Thank you for making my point for me.
You are not necessarily disagreeing with what I wrote about correlation, that humans are predictable in aggregate, which is the opposite of your point that humans are random (in aggregate).
The text you quoted is disagreeing with the author with respect to the use of correlations to explain causality, which we both know will lead nowhere if all confounding variables are not properly accounted for; something which is infeasible to do in the real world.
"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.[1] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man." - Wikipedia.
We don't know anything about how the parent poster uses his smartphone, if he has one.
This is a false equivalence; There is a slight difference between owning a smartphone with privacy and data collection management options and actively bringing into your home a device designed and acknowledged to constantly record and transmit data.
They aren't designed to constantly record or transmit. If they were sending that kind of info out the WAN connection, it would be noticed the day it's enabled.
If you trust Google to honor the privacy and data collection management options, then I see no reason not to apply that same level of trust to their home speaker product.
Now, whether these devices are capable of doing this on a targeted basis, that's possible. That same possibility exists with the closed source baseband chip in all our smartphones as well, though.
It was an experience that happened a single time a year ago. No money exchanged hands, it was just a fun thing they made for fan of the movie, and after the criticism, they apologized and never did it again.
Yes the parent comment makes it sound like this is something that happened all the time... I'm not sure why a comment literally spreading lies is the top comment, I guess HN loves crazy tinfoil hat alternative truth now.
Similarly with #3, it was a hardware bug that impacted a very very small number of devices, and which was fixed within hours of being reported. It was also very obvious the device was misbehaving so implying that Google was "spying" is stupid. Why would Google make the device light up and make noises if they were spying on you?
Ignoring the misleading/obtuse information here and focusing on the "hell nah" declaration:
Nobody is forcing you to use any of those smart speaker devices, and nobody is forcing you to buy them.
Many people really enjoy using their Google Home or an Amazon Echo, as it greatly improves aspects of their day-to-day life.
Some people with disabilities are actually greatly alleviate by this progress - they can now use their voice to control many different things within their house which was not possible before.
There are plenty of good use cases for these, and I'm sure there are legitimate ways people can decide they're happy with the trade-off.
However, for me this screams of a Facebook style scandal coming sooner or later. People buying these things often don't really know what the business model is behind this, and don't know really know how Amazon/Google is going to make money. We can all sit here and speculate about it as informed people, but that's not the general market. I could easily see in 2 years time people turning around and saying "What do you MEAN Amazon has been ordering more expensive versions of products when I use the Echo" or "What do you mean Google showed me adverts for Ron Paul because I keep asking it about chem trails".
The power of the information collected by these devices is incredibly far reaching, and incredibly profitable, and at the moment most people aren't really capable of giving informed consent.
People are giving you a lot of shit for this, but I agree. #1 was enough to swing it for me.
Unfortunately, my room mate bought two of them anyway, and so I've spent the last 6 months unplugging one of them every time I go to the bathroom.
By the way, they also aggressively throw multicast traffic around your network and upload at least 10 megabytes an hour to google even when idle.
My current speculation is that they are tracking android and possibly non-android devices as they move from network to network so they can better map who knows who.
Your first point reminds me of a recent podcast[1] where Tren Griffin said that sometimes the hardware is simply a distribution channel for the software, which is where all the margins are. He called this "software in a box."
This has been common for years now in the IoT sphere, and begins to infect everything in computing too.
To be honest, I just fucking hate it. When companies turn a product into a service, they can afford selling entry package at a loss, thus driving out competitors who sell products as products. Suddenly, you have yet another thing for which you need recurring payments (instead of one-time), and which will only work as long as the provider likes it. You lose freedom and control.
What is great is you get to chose. We have several Google homes in our house and they are used daily by my family.
Saved my butt two days ago. Son graduation was at an arena in the city and walking by the GH and asked drive time to find over 2x than normal.
Apparently a MLB baseball game that started 15 minutes after his graduation start time.
Usually traffic is out of the city not in. Thanks to Google made it in time. What is also cool is the arena name is a hard name to pronounce as named after someone who gave money to the University yet Google still got it on first try. Alexa and Siri can't handle such things.
But have zero problem with you not wanting one as it is a personal choice.
1. -> Not necessarily, they might just be trying to dominate the market, or just make such devices popular, then increase prices. However, it's probably about data gathering (and having an ad platform in-house) too.
1. Google and Amazon are pushing these with stupendous discounts, certainly below cost. That tells me that the revenue model is not the hardware. They hope to make money by manipulating me after I buy it. Nope.
2. Google injecting ads into the "My Day" information. Nope.
3. Google Home was found to be listening all the time due to a "hardware flaw." Nope.
4. Amazon devices doing the creepy laugh for no reason? Nope. I mean, come ON.
They couldn't pay me to incorporate one of these things into my living space. It's below-cost hardware running bigcorp-controlled, remotely updatable software intended to extract my info and dollars. Get lost!