The Amazon devices haven’t pushed out ads and they’ve been around years now. Google is an ad revenue focused company, so this is really no surprise as they need to monetize the device beyond just selling hardware.
Echo, Dot and Tap on the other hand provide features that (at the user’s discretion) let you purchase things from amazon, or use Amazon’s services – so they don’t have the same incentives as Google.
We’ve had an Echo since it first came out and I would wholeheartedly recommend getting one.
Aha! I read that post of yours as sarcasmdry humour about how the pre-processed food was that close to masticated – Checks what autocorrect did with that very carefully– that it made little difference…
Though come to think of it, isn’t that exactly what a blender does? Without the the saliva sure, but otherwise extreme mastication phew to the max!
Google Home Devices Start Playing Ads, Forcing Many to Reconsider Their Purchase
Ok, so yeah, this sucks, but the title of the article linked seems a bit extreme. I’d be interested in a follow up of just how many people actually DID reconsider their purchase and sold/sent back their Google Home… I’m going to guess it is similar to the ratio of people who said they were moving to Canada if Trump were elected to those that actually have…
(note: not that I am actually defending Trump, I just never made such a statement leading up to the election because I knew I’d never follow through)
You didn’t travel enough. In England and Holland, when I was touristing back then, you’d sit through as much as a half hour of commercials, mixed with a few trailers, before the movies started.
I keep teetering on the edge of considering on or another of these but I just pulled back to “Nope, not happening”.
That and the ability to change the terms of service anytime they want (for pretty much everything) and the likelihood that everything being said nearby might be stored and handed over to any law enforcement anywhere for any reason or even intercepted if the security of these things is as poor as I suspect it is…
If the abhumans who approved this believe that it is ‘not an ad’; just “continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users”(conveniently ‘unique content’ that appears to have been rather carefully produced by one of their ‘partners’); just what will they be willing to do when ads-we-admit-are-ads are eventually approved?
Google Home is literally a device that listens to your conversation, sends it to a Google server, and responds based on the content. That is the current reality. Are you saying there is no possibility that Google or a third party could ever abuse such a system?
It is possible that someone could go on a rampage with a railgun, but saying that ‘railguns are used in rampages’ is untrue.
Similarly it’s absolutely possible that Amazon or Google or Microsoft could violate their ToS, invite some incredibly easy slam dunk lawsuits, and start listening to non-codeworded conversations. Saying (constantly, as folks on the internet love to do) that they are doing it is without merit and doesn’t even really pass basic critical muster.
Companies are not randomly evil; companies are amoral entities designed to extract profit (at least the three we’re discussing here). They weigh profit vs risk and make decisions around that. Making a decision like you’re suggesting brings pros and cons (again, as an amoral profit-generating entity) - the pro is that you could target advertisements. This means you need to tell your advertisers you’re doing it or they won’t bother paying you more for it. Since they’re not doing that, they’ve either decided to not profitize this (improbable, markedly so even) or they’re somehow being very, very secret about it.
The cons of course were mentioned earlier - a huge slam dunk lawsuit that any lawyer would have a lawgasm for faster than you can say ‘pro boner’, not to mention possible government intervention. As an amoral profit-generating entity, you are weighing the possibility of making slightly more money on ads vs that sort of behavior; unless you’re a mentally deficient amoral profit-generating entity (which by definition these are not, given their size and ability to amorally generate profit) it’s an easy decision to make.
The question about whether the CIA/NSA/Etc can use it as a spying vector is MUCH more interesting because it fucks up the whole paradigm due to the fun secret government courts, but let’s not pretend that there’s a business justification here.
(It’s also noteworthy that security folks LOVE to run packet analysis stuff on these devices and so far haven’t found any evidence that they’re sending back audio data (which is a bunch of data, btw and not easily hideable))
Well, keeping in mind that my initial reply was a two-word quip, neither of which was “railgun”, I’m not trying to make anyone paranoid.
The ToS their customers agreed to by opening the box? I haven’t read them, so I can’t say what the companies give themselves permission to do, but here’s a quote from Samsung’s privacy policy for their smart TVs in 2015:
“If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”
If I hit “Agree” to the Google Home EULA, I don’t fancy my chances bringing a lawsuit against Google.
Google already has my browsing history, Amazon my purchasing history (including what I looked at but didn’t buy). Facebook knows what messages I typed but thought better of sending.They already make use of this data to deliver ads (sorry, “surface unique content”). I don’t see the audio data as very different.
We know that if they can, they and their foreign counterparts and countless hackers,will.
A brief description of how this works for the iPhone-only or data-privacy crew:
If you’ve used Google’s Assistant (formerly Now) function on your Android to look things up…or have your device signed into your google account and use Chrome on the device to look things up…it saves those search terms as “topics you’re interested in”. Those, your gmail or other synced calendars, and topics gleaned through gmails, other apps (like reminders to leave for my OpenTable reservation), previous locations, and other subjects you’ve set up as interests such as sports teams, leisure activities, tv, etc go to create the live feed. I’ve used it for a few years, and it’s really helpful to have one place my meetings, upcoming weather, travel times to home automatically popping up in the afternoon, and a bunch of (mostly) interesting articles to read.
In the past, I’ve gotten 3 different cards at the top about so-and-so movie opening today. Two were relevant, and I chalk the third up to my algorithm fuzzing. Click the link and it takes you to a page with synopsis, showtimes, etc. I didn’t get a card for Beauty and the Beast.
I’m not defending Google’s data privacy, aggregation nor advertising policies, but I’m leaning towards Team Not-an-ad based on personal observations.
You thought that a device that does the same thing as an Amazon Echo - which you know will advertise to you - which is cheaper than the Echo and is sold to you by an internet advertising company wouldn’t advertise to you?
Have you never seen ads from Google in your email? Or on your search page?
It’s a product from an advertising company that has been known for years to gather data from its users for advertising purposes. And you’re shocked that it would then advertise to users?
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this but “strangers trying to sell you things” is pretty much the definition of an ad. They exist on the radio, on television, on billboards, on the internet, in movie theaters, and in magazines.
Do you trust the government not to spy on you? Do you trust private companies with data that tracks every aspect of your daily life? Do you trust your finances (in the form of payment cards) to hardware and voice software that no one is allowed to vet?
Oh for the days when our anxieties weren’t so complicated.
