Googles home mini has been recording everything and sending to googles servers because of a “bug”

http://news.sky.com/story/...

@ThatDude exactly. The company that makes billions selling people’s data, accidentally recorded shit tons of it.

Do ppl now see why Apple makes a point of doing everything on device!

@practiseSafeHex Apple is/was also a part of PRISM, they can go fuck themselves.

Amazon Alexa does the same

Good job mine hasn't actually arrived yet then

Technically, it was caused by an over sensitive sensor, nothing related to software. Whether it was intentional or not, who knows. But unlikely considering they fixed it before it even shipped.

Not to mention, listening at all times would give them more irrelevant information than actual valid data on you.

P.S. Apple keeping things on the device is mostly bs. They do this for a few scenarios (like touch ID) but mostly everything else is transferred to their servers just like Google. The only difference is Apple won't use the information to advertise to you.

P.P.S. These devices have a mute switch

@justsomeguy I heard that it wasn't fixed before they shipped, hence the big issue about it.

I've also read several articles about it, that didn't mention anything about a sensor. They said it was a software bug that it wasn't relying on the "wake word" to start recording. As soon as it picked up voice it just started. Thats not a sensor issue, thats a software issue.

Also the Apple thing isn't BS, while they do of course send something to their servers eventually, they whole reason they have been building these new chips, with neural engines on them, is to be able to run more A.I. stuff locally without cloud support. Meaning it will never leave the device.

@practiseSafeHex "We learned of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Mini devices that could cause the touch mechanism to behave incorrectly.

"We rolled out an update on October 7 to mitigate the issue, before Google Home Mini is shipped"

The only people who had them was the free ones given out at a Google event. Also, their solution was completely disabling the touch button altogether. It had nothing to do with being activated by any word. It was 100% related to the sensor believing it was constantly being touched.

Also, Apple uses their chips to process the information locally to improve speed, that says literally nothing about the aforementioned data being transferred after calculation. It would improve response time and reduce server load. Nothing to do with privacy. In fact you can guarantee they transfer all the data if it's not simply only to improve their AI.

@justsomeguy ok fair enough on the broken button. Articles I read Misspoke.

Re: Apple, yes speed would be an issue too. But that’s not the selling point they are using. They are doing it, and have said so at their events, to highlight the increased privacy. They frequently compare them to competitors who send everything to the backend and say how there’s delivers the same performance and results without exposing you