When Google's announced that Nest Guard would receive a Google Assistant update, many homeowners who used the product were learning a significant detail for the first time.
Nest owners were surprised because Nest Guard, an alarm and motion sensor, had a microphone built into it. This microphone, according to Business Insider, was not mentioned in the specs or material describing the device. Owners didn't know it was there.
“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs,” a spokesperson told BI. “That was an error on our part.”
» Beware the holiday 'smart toys' that spy on your kids
Google’s announcement said that Nest Guard has one microphone and it is disabled by default. The company said the microphone was added to allow for potential future features like the ability to detect broken glass.
“We’ve built Nest Secure around you and the way you live, so you won’t be able to disarm the system using your voice. With the Google Assistant built in, your security system is now even more helpful,” read an excerpt from Google’s announcement.
The reactions on Twitter were mixed about Google’s intention of building it around “the way you live.” Some were mad at Google, but others were not surprised.
Oops! We neglected to mention we're recording everything you do while fronting as a security device. The fact that we can record you is in no way intentional, a mic must have just fallen into the device. https://t.co/ebNdMnD8jZ
— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) February 20, 2019
And this is why I don’t trust @Google hardware. While it’s not per se bad to put a microphone into an iot device, doing so without informed consent displays a shocking lack of respect for client’s wants and needs.
— Ashton Kemerling (@ashton) February 19, 2019
The crazy thing about this whole Google Nest, hidden microphone thing is that all the inexpensive smart TVs that people are filling their houses with also have microphones in them. And those TVs are actively sending data. By design.#YouAreTheProduct https://t.co/KoQYNHGSIK
— Bryan William Jones (@BWJones) February 20, 2019
If anything, the whole google nest secret mic debacle is a sign that we need more people tearing apart consumer goods to validate what the vendor is saying is true, or isn’t. https://t.co/XBugwzpxA6
— Daniel Cuthbert (@dcuthbert) February 20, 2019
"secret microphone" are not words I ever want to read regarding an item after I buy it
— Kylara 💗💜💙 (@KylaraEris) February 19, 2019
A PR tactic I started seeing from tech giants saying "nothing secret about it" when caught red-handed
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 20, 2019
If there's nothing secret about it, why being so shady?
(e.g. Facebook over Research app and Google over Nest)
https://t.co/Msz1rm2Ajd
Stop putting this crap in your homes people.https://t.co/JHs7C7p5Kk
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) February 20, 2019
Wait'll the people worried about Nest find out the Nexus in their pocket has a camera, microphone, accelerometer, GPS and a net connection.
— Kevin Fox 🦊😷 (@kfury) January 13, 2014
This controversy is the kind of thing Nest owners feared when the company was acquired by Google in 2014, according to a Forbes report. Buyers who had trusted their home security to Nest worried about them working under Google, who makes money serving ads targeted using personal data they collect.
“A lot of people are made uneasy because they entered an agreement (to share their personally identifiable stream of data) with one company (Nest) but now that agreement has been transferred to another company (Google),” Parker Higgins, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Forbes magazine in 2014.
The Nest acquisition seems to have been less successful than hoped for Google as well. A 2016 Ars Technica story described a company with hundreds of employees, unable to ship a product.
About the Author