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>"Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way," Osterloh said. "It's quite important for all these technologies to think about all users... we h

>"Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way," Osterloh said. "It's quite important for all these technologies to think about all users... we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity." How much do they not care about privacy that a chief exec with an army of lawyers and advisors "haven't thought about this before"?

hardwaresofton 7y ago
It's the wild west -- corporations are just doing what they want while governments are asleep at the wheel. Also, having an army of lawyers is exactly what allows for this -- you need to know which areas are gray in order to exploit them without risk of retribution/regulation. A basic minutes-long conversation would have likely arrived at the point of how recording of the owner themselves/third parties would affect the product.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >corporations are just doing what they want while governments are asleep at the wheel. That assumes the governments aren't in on it. They probably want the data more than the corporations. I mean, you know, "security" and all.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    The government itself doing the things these corporation do would generate loads of outrage. For whatever reason it's a lot more acceptable for a company to collect all this data so you can play music with your voice and then the government can secretly collect it all later if they wish.
    - Clubber 7y ago
      Are you not aware of the Ed Snowden revelations? I mean the NSA is piped into all these corporate data streams.
      - nkrisc 7y ago
        I'm very aware. That's kind of my point.
        Clubber 7y ago
        I'm sure selling data to the NSA, federal, state and local governments is very lucrative to these companies and is a primary revenue stream.
        nothrabannosir 7y ago
        A primary revenue stream? For a public company, which has to publish its financials yet somehow keep this hidden? This sounds far fetched, to be honest.
        faceblob2 7y ago
        Governments and corporations are filled with deceitful, self-serving, corrupt people. If there is a monetary interest, the transaction will take place. If that has to happen under the radar, it will. The agencies will excuse their actions by citing "defense". It is in the interest of National Security, therefore, that the data is handed/sold to the government, and the mechanism of this transfer is classified owing to National Security interests. Or maybe it's easier than that. Maybe Google is just a government agency. An Alphabet agency.
        nkrisc 7y ago
        Unlikely, in my opinion. More likely the government can come along with national security letters or other means we might not even be aware of and just take what they need. On the other hand some companies have been shown to be very willing to sell data to any buyer, not just the government. Phone carriers come to mind.
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      The point is, that a corporation takes data only from their customers who consent to it (if they would read it). The government would spie on potentielly everybody (and they do btw.)
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        Not really true. FB for instance stores tagged image data of non-FB-users.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >That assumes the governments aren't in on it. My theory is the opposite. Career politicians have a lot to lose from universal data collection. They are already running into issues caused by 5-year-old tweets; imagine if their whole digital history was leaked? This is the one silver lining regarding legislation prospects.
- dmix 7y ago
  The government should regulate whether devices alert themselves to new guests in the house?
tunap 7y ago
It is a scripted response tailored to convey a specific, albeit less than truthful, narrative Much like the Juul CEO telling the public not to use their product right before the next announcement they were under investigation. Hopefully, a similar investigation will be announced presently. Edited.intentiin > narrative
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  > Hopefully, a similar investigation will be announced presently. This will never happen.
saiya-jin 7y ago
C'mon, that a straight lie out there, plain and visible. The other alternative is that he is utterly incompetent at his role, which I don't believe for a second. He is probably be incompetent in speaking with media though
hos234 7y ago
Corporate Robots are programmed with 2 rules - Everything has to be scaled up & It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Then they are let loose on the world where they fuck up, junked and a new model with the same programming is wheeled in. Can they be reprogrammed is the question.
arkitaip 7y ago
Of course they know, they just need to cover their asses sue to the litigation risk.
XJ6 7y ago
All "big tech" are at it, I tried to go to "My Pictures" the other day and microsoft asked me to run my pictures through facial recognition. They said that by consenting I was asserting I had the consent of anyone who appeared in any of my photos or might appear in future which is insane to ask of anyone, no-one can really give that third party consent. Then when I refused they showed me a nag screen which didn't have that warning. Then just yesterday I opened google camera and it really wanted to run face recognition on my photos. I refused. I wanted to try the google podcasts but it was a brick because I had disabled "youtube & web activity" in google account settings. There was no way to subscribe to podcasts without web activity, the application said. And without subscribing there was nothing the app could do. We have a company claiming that because I don't consent to have my web and youtube activity tracked that there's no way I could subscribe to a podcast that I explicitly choose to subscribe to in an application designed for subscribing to podcasts. They don't stop trying, everyone is trying to hoover up all data, all the time.
- throw_xyzyz 7y ago
  If you're European report them for GDPR violations. A few billion dollars worth of fines will teach them not to do that again.
- pintxo 7y ago
  In case you are in the EU, this is a pretty clear case of a GDPR violation [1], you might want to raise this with you data protection agency. (They might have no resources to assists you though) [1] https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/ https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/, https://gdpr.eu/Recital-42-Burden-of-proof-and-requirements-for-consent/ https://gdpr.eu/Recital-42-Burden-of-proof-and-requirements-...
- jacobheric 7y ago
  I didn't even realize google had a podcast app. I just installed it and you're right, I can't subscribe to a podcast since I have disabled web activity history. That's a particularly egregious dark pattern.
- wowamit 7y ago
wmeredith 7y ago
They don’t care. They’re arguing in bad faith. It’s also called lying or being full of shit.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  You're wrong. They are not arguing in bad faith, because they are not arguing with you at all. They are informing you of what their products do, and what the products should likely do in the future. Debate, or argument, implies, at minimum, a two way discussion. That's not what's been going on. And I'm not sure that a debate ever will happen? The only politically palatable people even concerned about their loss of privacy are a few activists and people in the tech industry. (Can't really count on the pedophiles and the terrorists to be of any help in gaining the support of the larger populace.) Even worse, it's not even like the moms, grandmoms, grandpas, teenage girls, hell raising ex convict uncles, etc don't know that they lose their privacy to google, facebook, and youtube. They do know that they lose their privacy, and they just don't care anymore. Actually, maybe they never did care? I don't even know? It's sad.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Why should they care? Generally speaking, people want privacy when we fear that disclosure will cause us some harm. I'm aware that there is a spectrum of viewpoints on this issue, and that some people value privacy as an end itself. But I think for most people, if they do value privacy for its own sake at all, it can't be a very high priority. If it were, they wouldn't use Google, credit cards, or cell phones. Google, Amazon, etc. have a pretty good track record of not using private data against users. Which makes sense, because it is generally more profitable to act as the user's agent. This is exactly how most people think of private data in the hands of these big tech companies. There's still some data they'd rather these companies not have. Even if I trust my lawyer to act as my agent, I'd prefer they not have a video of me having sex with my wife. On the other hand, if they had access to an occasional snippet of conversation from an incorrect hotword activation, I wouldn't really care. I know, and my lawyer knows, that their economic interest is in maintaining my privacy. There's almost no value for them in disclosing my conversations, and they would lose my future business.
thisgoodlife 7y ago
I guess the whole point of hiring an army of lawyers and advisors is that you don't have to do all the things by yourself.
have_faith 7y ago
> stakeholders that might be in proximity I didn't realise visiting a friends house made me a stakeholder in all of their technology choices.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  It does. If their light switch doesn't work when I press it I'm annoyed. The fact that I care makes me as stakeholder. It's just that traditionally my opinion didn't matter much and my stake was tiny.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Or they might not even be friends. Walk down a street filled with Ring doorbells. You are being surveilled by strangers who have been fear mongered because a pedophile will steal their Amazon delivery.
  - dmix 7y ago
    A small Austrian retail shop got a $4k fine from GDPR because their surveillance camera pointed too broadly at a sidewalk. It'd be funny seeing regulators try to apply such restrictions on consumers.
- diminoten 7y ago
  How about in their car? Or on their land? Or anywhere that you rely on others to provide for your safety at all?
UserIsUnused 7y ago
>Ask forgiveness not permission. That's all that matters to big tech, that's what brings in the $$$
mtgx 7y ago
This is why I've preached this for a long time: It's not that regular users "don't care about privacy" as many are quick to conclude, but the vast majority simply don't understand. If even big tech execs don't understand these issues, then how can regular people?
michannne 7y ago
They are clearly at fault, but at this point customers need to be more cognizant of the fine print. I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March, which is around the time I started actively hunting for options to turn off anything which reveals private information. Taking steps to learn how to reduce my online footprint also helped
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March You found that they have no tracking data that they're willing to disclose to you. We don't know if that translates into actually having no tracking data.
csallen 7y ago
He immediately admitted that he warns guests in his own home about being recorded, and the article discusses the fact that the cameras have an LED light that turns on when recording. So it's clearly not true that he hadn't thought of this before.
DaniloDias 7y ago
If you are a privacy advocate, how could you work at google and sleep well? Why sign up for that kind of pain? To me- its more interesting that this exec is so clueless as to utter something so damning in such a cliched way. Gosh- was he really this earnestly naive? Or is it possible that this is sarcasm? How can you be a vp exposed to press and say something this unguarded or sarcastic IN FRONT OF PRESS?!? What is going on at Google that people like this are promoted/hired? “Our customers should consider warning guests and family that they use our products” -a google exec
jiveturkey 7y ago
It was not an admission, it was a poorly thought out conversational device. He would have done much better to say, "good question". In the same interview, in the very next sentence of the article: > Osterloh then acceded that warning houseguests about Nest devices' recording capabilities is proper etiquette, stating that he already does so. Given that he already warns his guests, he absolutely 100% certainly has thought about "all stakeholders", in quite that way.
zaptheimpaler 7y ago
Its a baldfaced lie. In 2019, with all the concern about privacy in the world it is inconceivable that they haven't thought about it. The transition of tech power to the sociopath overlords is complete.
hanniabu 7y ago
They've thought about it but they won't say that outside of closed doors for plausible deniability.

hardwaresofton 7y ago

It's the wild west -- corporations are just doing what they want while governments are asleep at the wheel. Also, having an army of lawyers is exactly what allows for this -- you need to know which areas are gray in order to exploit them without risk of retribution/regulation. A basic minutes-long conversation would have likely arrived at the point of how recording of the owner themselves/third parties would affect the product.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>corporations are just doing what they want while governments are asleep at the wheel. That assumes the governments aren't in on it. They probably want the data more than the corporations. I mean, you know, "security" and all.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  The government itself doing the things these corporation do would generate loads of outrage. For whatever reason it's a lot more acceptable for a company to collect all this data so you can play music with your voice and then the government can secretly collect it all later if they wish.
  - Clubber 7y ago
    Are you not aware of the Ed Snowden revelations? I mean the NSA is piped into all these corporate data streams.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      I'm very aware. That's kind of my point.
      - Clubber 7y ago
        I'm sure selling data to the NSA, federal, state and local governments is very lucrative to these companies and is a primary revenue stream.
        nothrabannosir 7y ago
        A primary revenue stream? For a public company, which has to publish its financials yet somehow keep this hidden? This sounds far fetched, to be honest.
        faceblob2 7y ago
        Governments and corporations are filled with deceitful, self-serving, corrupt people. If there is a monetary interest, the transaction will take place. If that has to happen under the radar, it will. The agencies will excuse their actions by citing "defense". It is in the interest of National Security, therefore, that the data is handed/sold to the government, and the mechanism of this transfer is classified owing to National Security interests. Or maybe it's easier than that. Maybe Google is just a government agency. An Alphabet agency.
        nkrisc 7y ago
        Unlikely, in my opinion. More likely the government can come along with national security letters or other means we might not even be aware of and just take what they need. On the other hand some companies have been shown to be very willing to sell data to any buyer, not just the government. Phone carriers come to mind.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    The point is, that a corporation takes data only from their customers who consent to it (if they would read it). The government would spie on potentielly everybody (and they do btw.)
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      Not really true. FB for instance stores tagged image data of non-FB-users.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >That assumes the governments aren't in on it. My theory is the opposite. Career politicians have a lot to lose from universal data collection. They are already running into issues caused by 5-year-old tweets; imagine if their whole digital history was leaked? This is the one silver lining regarding legislation prospects.
dmix 7y ago
The government should regulate whether devices alert themselves to new guests in the house?

tunap 7y ago

It is a scripted response tailored to convey a specific, albeit less than truthful, narrative Much like the Juul CEO telling the public not to use their product right before the next announcement they were under investigation. Hopefully, a similar investigation will be announced presently. Edited.intentiin > narrative

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> Hopefully, a similar investigation will be announced presently. This will never happen.

saiya-jin 7y ago

C'mon, that a straight lie out there, plain and visible. The other alternative is that he is utterly incompetent at his role, which I don't believe for a second. He is probably be incompetent in speaking with media though

hos234 7y ago

Corporate Robots are programmed with 2 rules - Everything has to be scaled up & It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Then they are let loose on the world where they fuck up, junked and a new model with the same programming is wheeled in. Can they be reprogrammed is the question.

arkitaip 7y ago

Of course they know, they just need to cover their asses sue to the litigation risk.

XJ6 7y ago

All "big tech" are at it, I tried to go to "My Pictures" the other day and microsoft asked me to run my pictures through facial recognition. They said that by consenting I was asserting I had the consent of anyone who appeared in any of my photos or might appear in future which is insane to ask of anyone, no-one can really give that third party consent. Then when I refused they showed me a nag screen which didn't have that warning. Then just yesterday I opened google camera and it really wanted to run face recognition on my photos. I refused. I wanted to try the google podcasts but it was a brick because I had disabled "youtube & web activity" in google account settings. There was no way to subscribe to podcasts without web activity, the application said. And without subscribing there was nothing the app could do. We have a company claiming that because I don't consent to have my web and youtube activity tracked that there's no way I could subscribe to a podcast that I explicitly choose to subscribe to in an application designed for subscribing to podcasts. They don't stop trying, everyone is trying to hoover up all data, all the time.

throw_xyzyz 7y ago
If you're European report them for GDPR violations. A few billion dollars worth of fines will teach them not to do that again.
pintxo 7y ago
In case you are in the EU, this is a pretty clear case of a GDPR violation [1], you might want to raise this with you data protection agency. (They might have no resources to assists you though) [1] https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/ https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/, https://gdpr.eu/Recital-42-Burden-of-proof-and-requirements-for-consent/ https://gdpr.eu/Recital-42-Burden-of-proof-and-requirements-...
jacobheric 7y ago
I didn't even realize google had a podcast app. I just installed it and you're right, I can't subscribe to a podcast since I have disabled web activity history. That's a particularly egregious dark pattern.
wowamit 7y ago

wmeredith 7y ago

They don’t care. They’re arguing in bad faith. It’s also called lying or being full of shit.

bilbo0s 7y ago
You're wrong. They are not arguing in bad faith, because they are not arguing with you at all. They are informing you of what their products do, and what the products should likely do in the future. Debate, or argument, implies, at minimum, a two way discussion. That's not what's been going on. And I'm not sure that a debate ever will happen? The only politically palatable people even concerned about their loss of privacy are a few activists and people in the tech industry. (Can't really count on the pedophiles and the terrorists to be of any help in gaining the support of the larger populace.) Even worse, it's not even like the moms, grandmoms, grandpas, teenage girls, hell raising ex convict uncles, etc don't know that they lose their privacy to google, facebook, and youtube. They do know that they lose their privacy, and they just don't care anymore. Actually, maybe they never did care? I don't even know? It's sad.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Why should they care? Generally speaking, people want privacy when we fear that disclosure will cause us some harm. I'm aware that there is a spectrum of viewpoints on this issue, and that some people value privacy as an end itself. But I think for most people, if they do value privacy for its own sake at all, it can't be a very high priority. If it were, they wouldn't use Google, credit cards, or cell phones. Google, Amazon, etc. have a pretty good track record of not using private data against users. Which makes sense, because it is generally more profitable to act as the user's agent. This is exactly how most people think of private data in the hands of these big tech companies. There's still some data they'd rather these companies not have. Even if I trust my lawyer to act as my agent, I'd prefer they not have a video of me having sex with my wife. On the other hand, if they had access to an occasional snippet of conversation from an incorrect hotword activation, I wouldn't really care. I know, and my lawyer knows, that their economic interest is in maintaining my privacy. There's almost no value for them in disclosing my conversations, and they would lose my future business.

thisgoodlife 7y ago

I guess the whole point of hiring an army of lawyers and advisors is that you don't have to do all the things by yourself.

have_faith 7y ago

> stakeholders that might be in proximity I didn't realise visiting a friends house made me a stakeholder in all of their technology choices.

wongarsu 7y ago
It does. If their light switch doesn't work when I press it I'm annoyed. The fact that I care makes me as stakeholder. It's just that traditionally my opinion didn't matter much and my stake was tiny.
snarf21 7y ago
Or they might not even be friends. Walk down a street filled with Ring doorbells. You are being surveilled by strangers who have been fear mongered because a pedophile will steal their Amazon delivery.
- dmix 7y ago
  A small Austrian retail shop got a $4k fine from GDPR because their surveillance camera pointed too broadly at a sidewalk. It'd be funny seeing regulators try to apply such restrictions on consumers.
diminoten 7y ago
How about in their car? Or on their land? Or anywhere that you rely on others to provide for your safety at all?

UserIsUnused 7y ago

>Ask forgiveness not permission. That's all that matters to big tech, that's what brings in the $$$

mtgx 7y ago

This is why I've preached this for a long time: It's not that regular users "don't care about privacy" as many are quick to conclude, but the vast majority simply don't understand. If even big tech execs don't understand these issues, then how can regular people?

michannne 7y ago

They are clearly at fault, but at this point customers need to be more cognizant of the fine print. I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March, which is around the time I started actively hunting for options to turn off anything which reveals private information. Taking steps to learn how to reduce my online footprint also helped

JohnFen 7y ago
> I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March You found that they have no tracking data that they're willing to disclose to you. We don't know if that translates into actually having no tracking data.

csallen 7y ago

He immediately admitted that he warns guests in his own home about being recorded, and the article discusses the fact that the cameras have an LED light that turns on when recording. So it's clearly not true that he hadn't thought of this before.

DaniloDias 7y ago

If you are a privacy advocate, how could you work at google and sleep well? Why sign up for that kind of pain? To me- its more interesting that this exec is so clueless as to utter something so damning in such a cliched way. Gosh- was he really this earnestly naive? Or is it possible that this is sarcasm? How can you be a vp exposed to press and say something this unguarded or sarcastic IN FRONT OF PRESS?!? What is going on at Google that people like this are promoted/hired? “Our customers should consider warning guests and family that they use our products” -a google exec

jiveturkey 7y ago

It was not an admission, it was a poorly thought out conversational device. He would have done much better to say, "good question". In the same interview, in the very next sentence of the article: > Osterloh then acceded that warning houseguests about Nest devices' recording capabilities is proper etiquette, stating that he already does so. Given that he already warns his guests, he absolutely 100% certainly has thought about "all stakeholders", in quite that way.

zaptheimpaler 7y ago

Its a baldfaced lie. In 2019, with all the concern about privacy in the world it is inconceivable that they haven't thought about it. The transition of tech power to the sociopath overlords is complete.

hanniabu 7y ago

They've thought about it but they won't say that outside of closed doors for plausible deniability.