This journalist’s experience with a Google Home Mini is being called a glitch, or malfunction.
But let’s face it: these “smart home” devices are DESIGNED to perform 24/7 hour audio surveillance. And a user has no way of knowing when the device is “phoning home” without checking the logs. Anyone who installs one of these stupid things is signing up for the possibility of being surveilled, accidentally or intentionally by a hostile party, without knowing it.
The privacy glitch that befell Google’s new £49 ($49) Home Mini speaker last week was small but, critics might suggest, still revealing.
The trouble started when journalist Artem Russakovskii, who had been given a review unit at the launch event on 4 October, noticed that the Mini kept turning itself on even when not commanded to.
Deciding to search for clues in the device’s logs, he got a shock:
I opened it up, and my jaw dropped. I saw thousands of items, each with a Play button and a timestamp.
The Mini, it seemed had recorded and uploaded to Google every sound detected in its vicinity for a two-day period, which seemed to be every sound no matter how inconsequential. It even activated after a simple knock on the wall.
This behaviour could be disabled and recordings deleted but only at the expense of harming the system’s future voice recognition accuracy.
If you value your privacy, don’t install a so-called smart speaker in your home, whether made by Google, Amazon, Apple, or any other company. It’s not worth it. The fact that microphones and cameras are standard in laptops, tablets, and smartphones and can be remotely hijacked is problematic enough.