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Mixed felings, Google

As I have been anxiously waiting for a new phone and especially the release of Pixel 4 I decided to watch the whole Made by Google event yesterday live.

Straight from the start I was impressed on Googles efforts for the environment. They have been carbon neutral since 2007 and are constantly pushing and supporting their supplier network to achieve the same. They are also looking into ways to make their products more sustainable: for example using recycled materials in Nest or removing the need to buy new devices all the time with Stadia.

They got me already there, but immediately after those announcement it was a cavalcade of new devices they want you to buy. And not just any devices, but devices that will sit around your house and listen to everything 24/7. This started to sound to me like a beginning of a dystopian scifi novel.

Sure, they tout that the users privacy is paramount to them. Things like on device processing without the need to send any data to them sounds all nice. But the fact is, they are already there, always connected. While they might still be the "Do no evil" company things might be different in the future.

Even if they do remain such privacy focused company, honoring their users it's not the only thread such technology imposes, there is always a chance that somebody else gets access to your data, or they get ultimatum from the government to hand it over. And scariest of all, knowing how much they invest in developing AI, someday it might become self-aware. And in all it's good will towards humanity it could still lock us up "for our own good".

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