UKC

Against my better judgement, a google home mini has taken up residence in our kitchen.  After the initial harrumphing and grumbling about my data being misused, it and I are starting to learn to live with each other.

No, I neither have nor want a home packed with smart controls (if want to turn the lights off or the heating up, there are switches and a thermostat to do that) but yes, it's a handy voice-enabled timer when you're cooking.  However, I'm beginning to see there is, or can be, rather more to it.  It's good that it will broadcast Radio Four when I ask it to, for example, and should be able to play music from my library on request once I've finally loaded it into google play.  But it's also surprising me by responding to some other questions, such as 'OK Google, what noise does a llama make? OKG tell me a joke, OKG sing to me, OKG applause please'.

I'm finding myself easily amused by it in small, but rewarding, ways.  Anyone else learning to forget about their data being shared and sharing their life with one of these?

T.   

No

I like my technology but I genuinely can't see a use for any of the smart assistants. If I played music at home then yes but I don't. 

Mr TC is a massive Apple fanboy, and aside from that we have Google wifi hubs in the house (boost the signal and also handy for managing teenage wifi access), but I've said no way to an Alexa/Google home/etc type thing. The thought of it, well, listening, creeps me out. 

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever the wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Exactly. My mum's cousin is Czech, and he had a lot of problems with the Czech secret police during the communist era - his apartment was bugged, his office was bugged, and, after the Velvet Revolution, he went out to his little country holiday home to find the place looked like it had been burgled, with evidence of surveillance apparatus being removed from there too. It seems strange to deliberately sit an eavesdropping device on your kitchen worktop.

A timely piece fom the guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/28/all-the-data-facebook...

I wouldn't put one in my house

We've had Alexa since Christmas. I'm of the opinion (no doubt shared by many on here) that I have very little to say that's worth listening to, while Mrs Stichtplate professes to be pleased that somebody in the house is listening to her.

As I'm not a politician, major league criminal, international terrorist or a multi-billionaire, I find it hard to see why anyone would bother wasting the bandwidth required to analyse the banal crap that makes up our daily audio output.

It's the fact 'they' can, though.

Yeah, but dependant on which nefarious 'they' you care to shake your stick at, 'they' can already bug your house, dose you with nerve agent or install porn on your hard drive (well, according to D. Green anyway ). 

Why worry about it? 

It's your bandwidth they are wasting, and it's automatic.

As you can see by my posting history, wasting bandwidth doesn't bother me .

I'm not, I'm never going to get one.
Mrs Lusk will have to carry on saying "You never listen to what I say."

I'm sure Amazon's only concern is building up your advertising profile but hacking into those kinds of devices is a prize that will carry a high price and it's only a matter of time before one of the big tech companies are seriously compromised and they have the kind of information that you really don't want in the public domain.

Well true. They just don't fit in with my argument for why we don't need Alexa/similar at home...

I read (or skim-read) that Guardian piece yesterday. It is a very interesting article for those of us who have been a bit flippant (such as myself and many commenters on this thread, saying "well I am not a politician or celebrity, why would anyone be interested?" etc)

It seems to me that the use of Alexa or similar, will not massively increase the usefulness of all the data already being gathered on us via Google searches etc. 
(my angle on this is that so many of our personal interactions and conversations happen online now, that our verbal conversations won't add much information....but then I do live alone and very often work alone )

Going back to the "I'm not a figure of public interest" thing - as the article says, lifestyle analysis via looking at your Google searches etc could (can?) be (are?) used to increase your insurance premiums, flight prices etc.

Oh what the nazis would have given to have one of these in everyone's houses just before ww2.

Whilst I appreciate the concerns of many about eavesdropping, security, the inevitability of such things being compromised, Lord Haw Haw sending me subliminal messages and much else, concerns which I shared ahead of the arrival of the Kitchen Witch as she is now known, it appears that I'm willing to trade the value and security of my personal data for a voice-activated kitchen timer, applause on demand and the ability to go into the kitchen and say 'OK Google, let's rock!' and be serenaded with AC/DC classics. 

It seems that I place a lower value on my personal data than I imagined.

T.

Google says it won't gather what it calls 'utterances' unless you say OK Google (and expects the same from app developers).  But it must be listening all the time anyway trying to catch those magic words, just not passing them on to their servers.

But it could... I think anyone could cobble together a sneaky app that got itself access to your microphone and did speech recognition on anything it heard.

Worth keeping an eye on all this stuff, imagine if you got wrongly accused of some criminal activity and some of this information became admissible evidence!!

For me, the greater worry would be that the data from my witterings so gathered could be used to get me sectioned rather than convicted...

T.

I've had one of these things in my kitchen to play music, check a recipe, or indeed do some simple sous chef functions....

it's called a wife.

Truth is stranger than sci-fi

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/south-park-alexa/

I can also imagine the school boy / drunken pranks at a friends house: "Alexa, order me 500 dildos and 20 gallons of lube". "Alexa, order me bomb making materials."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-echo-data-evidence-in-murder-case/

Hey, why knock Home Automation systems, they can do way more than just turn lights on/off.

Mine knows when I have lit the wood burner and sends the heat to the high priority areas.
When they are warm, there are other options depending on the temperature of the rooms and the time.

It knows when I have gone to bed, and sends the heat to the hot water storage, when that’s up to
temperature it sends any remaining heat to the under floor heating. If I haven’t lit the wood burner
and the tank is cold, it switches the immersion heater on for either an hour or until the water
reaches the set temperature.

It has an astronomical clock so it knows the time of sunrise and sunset and when the clocks change.
So when I walk into the kitchen and it’s dark, it turns the lights on and switches on the pond
lights, when I leave it turns them off. Etc, etc.

What I don’t want is my HA system to be reliant on my internet connection and someone else’s servers.
IF I could write a ‘skill’ into a Google System that talked directly to my local network then maybe
I would use one, but as I can’t, no thanks.