The idea of inviting an always-on recording device into our bedrooms would have once seemed beyond creepy, but now most consumers hardly give it a second thought.
As Android Police reports[1], a small number of Google Home Mini review units given to tech reviewers malfunctioned, persistently recording audio in the background without being activated by a hotword. The Home Mini units gave no indication they were recording beyond silently flashing their four display lights — a notification that you’d only notice if you were looking directly at the device.
As observed on the dysfunctional Home Mini unit that raised the red flag:
“Several days passed without me noticing anything wrong. In the meantime, as it turns out, the Mini was behaving very differently from all the other Homes and Echos in my home – it was waking up thousands of times a day, recording, then sending those recordings to Google. “
The seriousness with which Google handled the Home Mini incident (they sent someone to physically pick it up from the guy’s house!) shows that it was definitely a case of a device gone rogue and not something more nefarious, but it’s still a good privacy reminder. So far, Google specified that this issue only affected pre-release units and not the consumer version of the Google Home Mini. It issued a software patch to fix the behavior, issuing this response: “We have learned of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Minis that could cause the touch mechanism to behave incorrectly. We are rolling out a software update today that should address the issue.”
Home assistants that connect to the internet to answer inquiries and parse voice commands are at risk, just like anything...