Google Home, or, The Subtle Art of Recording Your Every Go’ram Move
Throw open your windows and roll out the red carpet Australia: Google Home has launched. With it, our benevolent dictators promise to connect your physical and digital worlds like never before, to allow you to interact conversationally with your handy AI-powered robot helper and thus live out your Star Trek-inspired fantasies (or at least those ones involving Majel Barrett). “Hello, Computer” indeed.
Of course, voice assistants are nothing terribly new; Apple, Google and Microsoft all have AI assistants of their own to offer, each with varying degrees of usefulness. But the Home promises more than simple pocket-based Q&A. Google want to offer you a one-stop-shop with which you can control your entire digital life, hands free. Check the weather, get news updates, control your home’s lighting, get recipes, and access your media library, all without lifting a finger. Presumably the end goal is for our physical bodies to become frail, shrivelled husks, propelled through space by the sheer will of our robot-enhanced grey matter — Mars Attacks meets Futurama’s Brain Spawn, by way of Wall-E.
Home By The Numbers
Google, and their parent company Alphabet, are usually cagey about sales data, but what we do know suggests that Google probably aren’t pinning their hopes for their inevitable moon base on Home sales.
The Chromecast, a wireless media streaming device, was Google’s first real attempt at capturing the connected home market. It performed respectably, reportedly having sold 30 million units in the US since launch. The device remains a competitively priced and relatively simple solution to the problem of getting media from your smartphone onto your television.
Google Home is a slightly different beast. Although it too seeks to capture the burgeoning connected home market, its raison d’etre is a bit more nebulous. Unlike the Chromecast, there’s no real problem it seeks to solve. Rather, it creates a problem that then places itself at the centre of solving it— a tried and true strategy ever since marketing graduates first oozed out from someone’s pit in uniquely bland suits and ties.
The Home is $200 worth of solution to a problem nobody has too — not exactly prohibitively expensive, but hardly chump change either. Just enough to entice the early adopters and the slightly more generous birthday shopper.
It’s launch back on its home turf was less than stellar. It was beaten to market by the Amazon Echo, a device that offers more functionality than its competitor, with arguably just as much consumer awareness. Between that, and the fact that the connected home market is still very small, Strategy Analytics’ estimate that Google have only sold 1 million units since launch should come as little surprise. The Echo, by comparison, is estimated to have sold 6.3 million units last year alone.
But then, I doubt hardware sales are Google’s primary goal with the Home.
“Hey Google, Who Am I?”
It’s well documented that Google is first and foremost an advertising company. Everything that they do ultimately serves that end goal — from search, to images, to email, to mobile, to hardware.
The endgame of Google Home isn’t to get a listening device in every dwelling — though I doubt they’d mind if they did. The objective is to normalise the concept of voice-activation and connected homes. Google want to cement the idea that our real and digital lives can be deeply integrated, and Google services are the key to this integration; that by feeding Google the minutiae of our lives, our existences will be enriched by their involvement.
What this means for Google, of course, is more data. The more time we spend using their hardware and platforms, the more data they accrue about us — which can then be sold to advertisers.
The sheer volume of data being acquired is staggering. To the enterprising criminal, your location history alone represents a far greater honeypot than any single credit card. Consider: how long have you been using Google Maps? If you’re anything like me, it’s been literal years — and you can trace your steps back through those years, following the course of your life as laid out on Google’s own maps.
That’s just one of the services the search giant offers. Consider the reams of data they must acquire across email, documents, search, connected health, and the various apps that use Google as an identity platform. Google own the data. They collect it, interpret it, use it, and sell it. We exist as a collection of hundreds of thousands of data points. To be forgotten is obscenely difficult; to be removed is nigh impossible.
The Cost of ‘Free’
I don’t pretend for one moment that Google’s suite of services aren’t useful. They’re meticulously engineered, lovingly designed, and practically ubiquitous. But they aren’t free.
Oh, they don’t cost any money. The Pixel, the Chromecast, the Home, and their brethren are, within the galaxy of Google products, aberrations. These physical manifestations of Google’s empire serve only to perpetuate the image of the tech-powered utopia they offer, at which Google is the centre. No, these are mere trinkets compared to the various app stores bloated with schools of Google-powered apps, all of which have their own slice of convenience to offer at the temptingly low price of $0.
The true cost is our data. It is measured in every location captured, every website accessed, every purchase made and every request uttered. We exist as a collection of hundreds of thousands of data-points to be aggregated, collated, analysed, and sold.
I’m not suggesting that we all immediately delete our accounts, burn our phones, and live in the woods where we’ll subsist on fruit and nuts — burning all that metal and plastic would be hell on the environment, and besides, I like ice-cream too much. And it’s not as if Google is the only offender.
But it’s worth using the launch of Google home on our shores to consider our digital selves — how much we give, and to whom. Install Privacy Badger to gain better control over who gets your browser cookies. Or go whole hog and learn how to encrypt your entire life. Give Note to Self’s excellent Privacy Paradox series a go, and gain a glimpse into just what’s going on behind the scenes, and what you can do about it.
At the very least, reconsider your notions of what ‘free’ really means. Rather than think of Google as being free, think of it as a paid service — an automatic transaction that occurs every time you open your browser or pull out your phone. A data direct-debit.
Once you can think of it this way, once you can visualise a coin dropping into a till for every app you open, then you start to be more aware of what the cost really is.
Cha-ching.
