Google Shoots Itself In The Foot, Secretly Records Conversations

Adding to the company’s growing woes involving privacy concerns and its role in spreading fake news, Google just shot itself in the foot with a new spying scandal. Apparently, its upcoming Home Mini speaker has a feature that would secretly listen in on its user’s conversation without permission. This incident comes at the worst possible time for Google since it’s trying to compete with Amazon’s Alexa.

The whole debacle started when a reviewer noticed how the Home Mini would record him while talking to someone with no indication that it was doing so, Business Insider reports. Once word got out that this was happening, Google went into damage control mode and promised to fix the issue by permanently disabling the listening feature.

Google even said that the eavesdropping was not intentional and was caused by a fault in one of its buttons. Unfortunately for the company, this was simply the worst possible time for it to suffer a privacy scandal.

Just like Apple and other tech firms, Google is intent on knocking Amazon off its perch as the king of smart assistants and speakers. The merchant giant’s Echo Dot and Alexa combo is far too big of a success for anyone to match. In an effort to counter this power duo, Google created the Home Mini, which is the smaller version of its Home smart speaker and is paired with its Google Assistant AI.

Such an arrangement would have given the tech firm a good chance at finally reaching the same level of adoption as the Dot and Alexa. With this new spying incident, however, it’s going to be a big challenge to earn the trust of consumers.

As Bloomberg notes, however, this problem isn’t exclusive to the Home Mini. Even the Echo and Apple’s Home Pod are devices that are always listening. Companies constantly assure consumers that there are no privacy concerns, but taking big firms at their word has burned consumers before.