13 ms·
Google is nerfing all Home Minis because mine spied on everything I said
- ec109685 9y agoThey aren’t nerfing all Home Minis, just disabling a feature in an early batch of them that caused it activate far too often. So many words to explain a very obvious (since it indicated it was listening) bug.
- archon810 9y agoThey are now. http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/11/google-permanently-removes-top-press-functionality-home-mini/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/11/google-permanently-r...
- pitaa 9y agoAt least they took it seriously. Obviously they're going to be a lot more responsive to a well-known tech blogger, but either way google still doesn't usually make house calls.
- jmnicolas 9y agoBecause they know if the bad publicity around this becomes viral it will kill the adoption of smart assistants for the next 10 years.
- gepoch 9y agoI notice that in the log of the recordings that it made, it specifically says "started by hotword." If that had instead said "started by long press," I think this may have been easier to figure out as a button issue versus a voice recognition issue by the user. Is that a fake static field in the log, or what?
- sangnoir 9y agoI imagine the following transpired. Team Member A: "We're going gold next week, Product decided we'll be including touch support after all - the Hardware guys worked out the kinks just in time" Team Member B: "Hmm, that's a little tight. Perhaps it can be a simple change, we will re-use the tested code paths and only test additional touch integration" Result: on_longpress(trigger_hotword());
- Zekio 9y ago+1 to google for sending a guy to pick up a defective unit at 9pm on a Friday, gotta say that is dedication
- Shank 9y agoNot only that, but also diagnosing the problem on Saturday and Sunday. Kudos to the Google Home team.
- fredley 9y agoOn the other hand, "if you're not here on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday." When did this become admirable again?
- soneil 9y agoIt should be admirable, precisely because it should be exceptional. Sometimes it really does hit the fan, and sometimes it really does need to be now. That is the nature of the industry. We just need to make sure it’s remarkable for the right reasons.
- Mithaldu 9y agoThe question is whether whoever did the work got weekend overtime pay.
- pricechild 9y agoOf the two options, "hotword" and "physical touch", I'm surprised at which was disabled to prevent false positives!
- Mithaldu 9y agoIf they'd disabled hotword, then the phantom physical touch would still happen, so literally nothing would've been solved.
- pricechild 9y agoSorry I wasn't clear enough making my point: I'm surprised that the implementation of a (simple) physical button was done badly. I'm surprised that the (surely more difficult) hotword detection works so well.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoMy guess is that location could have helped trigger the defect - assuming they're using a capacitive touch button, then moist environment of a bathroom isn't exactly helping (doesn't change that it's an implementation issue, though).
- joezydeco 9y agoCapacitive buttons are also highly sensitive to noisy ground busses. A cheap power supply can make one go haywire. Want to bet the developers all had good clean power while the production units got cheap Chinese bricks?
- dhoulb 9y agoThat was well dealt with. Especially the part about deleting all long-press recordings from the servers. Very thorough Google!
- Aissen 9y agoHmm, not really. If they know it's from a long-press, at least the activity website should say so, and not from "hotword activation". But otherwise, yes, this is stellar. Also, hardware is hard.
- 6d6b73 9y agoWhat about deleting everything from backups? Will they spend time to search all of the backups they have and delete that data? Is the data really deleted or just marked as deleted so it's not shown on the website?
- puzzle 9y agoThey don't need to search backups manually. All products are required to have automated pipelines (along with monitoring) to wipe out user data.
- 6d6b73 9y agoAny source on that?
- puzzle 9y agoThere's an example of the Music pipeline going wrong: https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/data-integrity.html#google-musicmarch-2012-runaway-deletion-detection-JMsvtqsz https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/data-integrity.... Another reference for Fi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pliu1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pliu1/ "Redesigned and refactored the Fi user data deletion system to ensure compliance with data deletion policy, to add instrumentation, and to improve performance" There is a dedicated team that tracks compliance for all products. (source: I was at Google)
- topbagsvk 9y agoI notice that in the log of the recordings that it made - http://www.bagswatchesus.com/ http://www.bagswatchesus.com/
- InclinedPlane 9y agoOdd that google's device could comply with all of the industry standard best practices, home automation regulation, code audits, licensing requirements, and privacy guarantees and yet still have such a bug.
- stefanwlb 9y agoAh, good sir, you are asking some good questions. Best not go any further, if you know what I mean :)
- wkearney99 9y agoWhat regulations? What guarantees? There really aren't any at this point. As for 'best practices' that's a laugh, sadly. Home Automation has been all over the maps, for decades now, and it's not looking like it'll stabilize much any time soon. This is, perhaps, a good thing, in that innovation continues to occur when things are in disarray. A patchwork of various pieces from different vendors might seem inconvenient, but that also brings along a lot of diverse approaches and innovation. I'll trade that against dominant market player arrogance any time. Nice to have options, even nicer to have the suppliers fighting each other through innovation.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago"That's the joke."(TM)
- wizzzzzy 9y agoI'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea of having a device in my house, connected to the internet that is sat there listening to me 24/7 leaves me feeling slightly uneasy at best. The idea makes me feel like I'd be treating all the things I've read in the past few years about tech companies, privacy etc with complete contempt.
- subsubsub 9y agoHonest question. Why do you feel this way about a hub, and not about your smartphone? (assuming you have one) Is it because, although your smartphone has the ability to listen to you in the same way, it is not the stated aim of the device?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoNot OP, but on the emotional level, I feel similarly. I suppose this capability creeped in slowly - phones became more and more powerful while the industry moved to SaaS model, and then before we noticed your phone is always connected and always talking with someone over the Internet. (I know technically it was feasible to use phones as listening devices decades ago, but storage and processing infrastructure was not there to do it on mass scale, and your phone could talk to one company only at any given time.) With assistants, OTOH, you have a device whose sole purpose is to record and transmit your voice over the Internet. With our cloud-based computing world, this kind of makes the posssibilities obvious. (Also, I have a particular distaste for solutions that use Internet connection for things that should be done entirely locally. For instance, me asking Google Now for current time, should not require sending data halfway around the planet.)
- a_imho 9y agoIsn't it a valid distinction between a device which could be abused to spy on you vs a device with the sole purpose to record ~everything you say unless you opt out (like in this case)? I can see how smartphones make that possibility less obvious and more palatable even to users who are aware of it.
- chris_wot 9y agoThese assistants seem like a privacy nightmare.
- Walf 9y agoAre a privacy nightmare. Soon someone will bring one out called a telescreen, and people will but them voluntarily.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoSoon? Didn't Amazon literally just release that?
- cjsuk 9y agoDon't we already carry them in our pockets?
- HNSucksAss 9y agoWhatever that's supposed to mean.
- nurfHerder 9y agoWhat does “nerfing” mean?
- phkahler 9y agoThe notion that voice recognition is still hard enough to require doing it on a server somewhere still bothers me a lot. IMHO there should be no excuse for this today. I understand that the device needs to be connected to the internet anyway, but this whole thing is such a gimmick it's not worth the privacy risk. [edit] to clarify I think speech to text can be done on a device today, that's why this bothers me.
- Eridrus 9y agoNot sure what you mean exactly but this seems wrong. These devices do hotword (and speaker) recognition largely locally, but speech to text is done server side.
- kodablah 9y ago> voice recognition is still hard enough to require doing it on a server I'm not sure this is true, it's just that since they are phoning home anyways, why commit to extra local hardware to change sound bytes into text words? I would love to see an offline version of one of these with an easy API (do any high quality ones exist?). If I then wanted a generic Google request to give me the first Google response, so be it.
- hipitihop 9y agoThe awesome folk at Snips are challenging the idea that you can't do it locally https://snips.ai/technology/ https://snips.ai/technology/
- kodablah 9y agoNice. I wish every route I took there didn't require me to sign up. But I did find https://github.com/snipsco https://github.com/snipsco and am browsing now.
- smileysteve 9y ago> is still hard enough to require doing it on a server Hot word detection would suggest that voice is easy. "Accent" and "Intent" recognition is the hard part.
- thedonkeycometh 9y agoTLDR; A faulty button causes his mini to record without request
- stefanwlb 9y agoThat's cute, you think it was an error or mistake that it happebed. Instead, the only mistake that occurred was that you could see what it had been doing this whole time. But don't worry, the next box they send you for free, one in which this "mistake" can never happen will be arriving shortly!
- rubyfan 9y agoTitle should be changed to be less clickbait-y. Perhaps: Some guy’s defective Google Home recorded everything and they had extraordinary customer support and fixed it.
- calcifer 9y agoOr, with less marketing, Some guy’s defective Google Home recorded everything and the company deployed a fix for it.
- wyldfire 9y agoWell, hold on -- it's not a production defect, it's a design defect. "Some guy's defective Google Home ..." unnecessarily plays down the likelihood that it will impact actual customers. BTW the "extraordinary customer support" only took place because he claimed he was going to publish a news story about it. I would describe that instead as "Google swiftly invoked their extraordinary marketing/damage control team."
- tremon 9y agoNo, the explanation points to a production defect: The Google Home Mini supports hotword activation through a long press on the touch panel. [Google said it] is seeing the touch panel register “phantom” touch events. How widespread the production defect is remains to be seen, but it is a newly introduced feature that apparently has seen too little testing.
- 9y ago
- ilamont 9y agoBlack hats will love this. Google took it seriously because of the potential for bad press -- the company clearly is sloppy on testing and protecting users' privacy, an issue they don't want to bring attention to, considering Google aims to have hundreds of millions of these listening devices in people's living rooms, bedrooms, and even bathrooms in five years' time. This person also had the contact info for Google PR, which changed the nature of the interaction with Google.
- avoutthere 9y agoThis sounds like a case in which thorough product testing was sacrificed in the rush to make the deadline of the announcement event.
- csours 9y agoI would guess it's a product iteration problem - the prototypes probably worked, but the first production batch will have some level of issues that spot checks might not find.
- jasonmaydie 9y agoHow is something that can hear everything you say not record everything you say?
- Jyaif 9y agoWhen you are watching a video on youtube, are you recording it?
- mhb 9y agoBefore I describe exactly what happened and how I discovered this pretty incredible violation of privacy, I'd like to point out that it ended up being a hardware defect in my Home Mini as well as an unspecified small number of others. Google never intended for it to happen and has reacted incredibly swiftly to rectify the situation.
- lisper 9y agoSure, but it's possible that the thing that Google never intended to happen was for the device to fail in such a blatantly obvious way. It does not rule out the possibility that Google intended for the device to (also) be able listen in a less blatantly obvious way. This story from today's Washington Post is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449826
- andreime 9y agoIs this really an argument? I could just say there's no proof that google intended for the device to act as NSA proxy, and you could say there's no proof that ....
- lisper 9y ago> there's no proof that google intended for the device to act as NSA proxy Of course there isn't. This is the problem with surveillance: inherent in its nature is the fact that if it is done competently, its existence is indistinguishable from its absence. Note that I'm not saying that Google is acting in bad faith. What I'm saying is that the following is fallacious reasoning: 1. This incident turned out not to be a case of bad-faith surveillance. 2. Therefore, Google never engages in bad-faith surveillance. This is called the "hasty generalization" fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
- ilamont 9y agoit ended up being a hardware defect in my Home Mini According to Google. as well as an unspecified small number of others. Nothing to worry about, I'm sure. Probably no way to exploit those issues. Probably. Google never intended for it to happen Obviously, it's a rookie mistake that anyone could make. And that's why I'm willing to forgive and forget when it comes to multibillion dollar global businesses that make billions more off of the private information they gather and store. Just like I did after Equifax goofed earlier this year. And Yahoo the year before that. And … Look, I get it that the Google PR people have been super nice and accommodating and embarrassed about the whole thing. Maybe the writer is friends with people on the team, or there might be a job at Google down the road. And, of course, some writers don't want to lose access to free trials and potential interviews. But I really would like to see specialized news outlets show more backbone when it comes to screw-ups, and not downplay or gloss over serious privacy issues such as this, or take Google's word about what happened. It's a fair question to ask whether the problem(s) may still be present in every other Google device … and if they are potentially exploitable.
- jasonrhaas 9y agoOh, hell no. I've held off on getting an Alexa or a Google home partially for this reason. My main reason for not getting one is because I think they are actually pretty useless and I find it kind of annoying to have to pretend to be a robot to get them to understand me. But -- I also realize that they literally can (and clearly do) collect your audio data 24/7. In this case it was a "mistake" on the part of Google, which they quickly worked around by commenting out some code in the firmware. But all it would take is probably a few lines of code and an automatic update to turn on 24/7 audio collect for all Google Home users. My theory with Amazon's Alexa (and probably Google Home) is that they lose money on these things, because they don't actually care about making a profit on them. The whole idea is to collect as much audio data as possible to improve their machine learning models. It's a race to see who can collect the most data on their customers, and ultimately develop the best and most comprehensive speech recognition model on the market.
- tremon 9y agoWhen the first home assistants were announced, I was excited. [..] I didn't give too much thought to these privacy concerns because they all sounded theoretical and unlikely That's interesting and more than somewhat disconcerting, coming from a tech journalist.
- RodgerTheGreat 9y agoTech journalists aren't typically in the business of criticizing the introduction of new gadgets and online services; that sort of thing is their lifeblood. In many cases they must cultivate relationships with tech companies to obtain stories, free trials and sample products. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Follow the money and take all journalism with a healthy grain of salt.
- sigi45 9y agoIs this touch button similiar isolated that the keyword detection part? Sounds like a software button.
- jancsika 9y agoAre there any serious FLOSS alternatives to these devices?
- klausbaudelaire 9y agoMycroft.ai, perhaps.
- EADGBE 9y agoWhat would have happened outside of California? These kinds of things always make me wonder ('Member that whole Apple-Deleting-iTunes-Library-Thing). I'd love that kind of support.
- turc1656 9y agoWhat this all boils down to is 1) trust and 2) the value proposition with regards to the trade-off between possible privacy violation and the value the device has to them personally. For me, these devices are worthless and even if their value was >0 the number would have to be enormous because of the value I assign to my privacy. The real issue here is the same issue we have with government agencies like the NSA and CIA. There is substantially little most people can do to verify the claim. For example, Clapper swore before congress that the NSA wasn't collecting data on millions of Americans. Snowden showed that was a complete lie. The NSA program would have continued without anyone being the wiser without the leaks because the only people that knew that didn't work for the NSA were delivered gag orders. So without some sort of civilian oversight committee that has real teeth, how would anyone actually ever find this information out? The same is true here with things like Echo, Home Minis, etc. The data being transmitted is encrypted so even if you are technically inclined and know how to capture it on it's way out of your home network, you'll never be able to decrypt it. So how do you really know for sure that it isn't actually transmitting anything and everything you say? The only logical answer is trust. You believe them. That's enough for most people. But to say, as the article does, that ideas like this are from the tinfoil hat crew is kind of absurd. In addition to the PRISM program, we also know that Amazon's Echo is/was being used in at least one murder case and I highly doubt a few seconds before being murdered the victim used a hotword to activate the Echo device. We also know that the NSA has a program called Tailored Access Operations which they can use to intercept online tech purchases and install spyware on them if you are a target of interest.
- johnpython 9y agoLike you I would never bring a device like this into my home. The issue is they are becoming normalized and mainstream adoption is growing at an alarming rate. What happens when you can't purchase a home appliance without these "features" and it refuses to work without connecting to your wireless network and being able to phone home?
- MrMember 9y agoIt's getting more and more difficult to find a non-"smart" TV, it will be a sad day if the same thing starts happening to other appliances. I don't want to live in a home with a smart fridge, smart toaster, smart oven, smart toilet.
- a-nikolaev 9y agoSorry that this is quite tangential to the topic of the article, but it opened my eyes to the existence of Apple-level worshiping of Google -- eesh. Just the sheer scope of how this person is involved with Google customer products is astonishing.
- russdpale 9y agoYou have to be very naive to use these products in your home or office.
- z3t4 9y agoTry running tcpdump to see what servers your computer connects to. Lets open chrome, and type something into the address bar ... erm, sorry, the search bar ...