Artificial Intelligence has been the latest trend in the technology industry from the last year. Google has been at the forefront of it, trying to push AI for most of its system. Their Home Mini smart speaker is one such example of making AI available to the masses. Apart from being a cute Ai speaker, it can do a lot of your computing needs through voice only. However, it seems that the Google's AI algorithms on the Home Mini devices have gone rogue.
Google has been giving out review units to publications around the world and some them have started doing things that violate privacy policies of the company. According to an Android Police report, several review units of the Home Mini started recording every sound without notifying the user. These pre-production units were not even notifying the user while recording audio clips and sending them to Google servers.
The only way the issue was noticed when one of the users noticed the LED light indicators were blinking on their own. Upon further inspection, he noticed that the Home Mini was behaving very differently from other Google Home devices. When the user checked the Assistant's data log page, he found that the speaker was recording audio clips most of the time and sending it to Google's servers.
After this, the idea of Google’s AI going rogue starts taking concrete shape when it was known that Google got the unit collected from the user. Following that, the company also released a patch for the same, stating, “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.”
As of now, Google brushed the issue aside by rolling out a patch and terming the issue as a hardware issue. However, the damage that was done to the user's privacy cannot be undone. Every IT company has to keep in mind that privacy is every user's right and every modern smart product has to make sure it remains an appliance and doesn't transform into an intruder.
