If you told someone 2008 that the fun scrappy startup offering Gmail would be reading your emails for ads* (see reply to this!) until 2017 and only stopped when another tech company had a massive leak of personal information which helped sway a presidential election* people would call you absolutely mad.
Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started reading our emails. I see no reason why listening devices will be any different.
If the information is available and valuable to Google (and me talking to my spouse about buying a new computer next week sure is!) they will slowly walk towards getting it. The steps are pretty clear:
1. Have listening device which only listens to "OK Google" mass adopted
2. Increase capabilities for EASILY defensible safety reasons, listening to alarms, then screams, then personal threats, etc
3. Face backlash over 2. and easily defend it because who wouldn't want to save children from burning buildings etc.
4. Public begins to paint privacy minded folks as crazies for wanting to burn children alive.
5. Repeat 2 through 4 a few times.
6. Ease into that ad listening because everyone either thinks you do it already or they just don't care because they're exhausted hearing people raise alarms for 2.
I'm not saying this is a nefarious management plan to ease into surveillance either. Google's MO is put money and time into making a feature useful then eventually monetize it. Making "OK Google" listening devices useful in ways the public finds acceptable is where they're at now. Eventually they will have paved the way for it to be profitable and palatable for the public when it's always listening to us.
* Google changed this policy right around Cambridge Anlytica time
> If you told someone 2008 that the fun scrappy startup offering Gmail would be reading your emails
Google explicitly stated their would read your emails to show ads next to them at launch. This was a surprise to nobody.
> and only stopped
It never stopped reading mail. How do you think searching your inbox or filtering spam work?
In light of this, the rest of your post is pure conspiracy theory nonsense. Google was upfront about the reasons for reading your mail at the beginning. Why should any of that change?
Wow, Google did lunch with ad scanning huh! I misremembered the controversy, I followed it closely at launch but that was loong ago.
That does hurt my premise but I think it overall still holds:
- Google did stop reading email for ads in 2017 as I said in an other post[1].
- Google does have a policy of innovate then monetize later. That was explicitly what they did with Google Maps
- GMail was a good (but bit wrong as I brought up!) example of creeping surveillance, but Chrome provides a good example as well[2]. Google sells ads, it's products will be optimized to gather information for it.
"Reading your emails for ads" [and search]: Even though that term was popularized by lots of MS negative campaigns (remember Scroogled?) but it makes as much sense as saying "Excel is reading your private financial records on your spreadsheets to give you its auto complete" or "Photoshop looking at your most private photos to let you change their saturation/brightness".
Obviously some are more useful to the user than others but they're all computer programs taking your data, running some code and returning a response. There is no human in the loop "reading" things
Emails were sacred back then and it took Google and long and slow creep to face little backlash when they started reading our emails. I see no reason why listening devices will be any different.
If the information is available and valuable to Google (and me talking to my spouse about buying a new computer next week sure is!) they will slowly walk towards getting it. The steps are pretty clear:
1. Have listening device which only listens to "OK Google" mass adopted
2. Increase capabilities for EASILY defensible safety reasons, listening to alarms, then screams, then personal threats, etc
3. Face backlash over 2. and easily defend it because who wouldn't want to save children from burning buildings etc.
4. Public begins to paint privacy minded folks as crazies for wanting to burn children alive.
5. Repeat 2 through 4 a few times.
6. Ease into that ad listening because everyone either thinks you do it already or they just don't care because they're exhausted hearing people raise alarms for 2.
I'm not saying this is a nefarious management plan to ease into surveillance either. Google's MO is put money and time into making a feature useful then eventually monetize it. Making "OK Google" listening devices useful in ways the public finds acceptable is where they're at now. Eventually they will have paved the way for it to be profitable and palatable for the public when it's always listening to us.
* Google changed this policy right around Cambridge Anlytica time