We’ve all likely viewed scary movies where a creepy person is stalking outside of a family’s home watching their every moves. If Google gets its way, a lot of us may be experiencing this unsettling phenomena sooner rather than later. The Blaze reported that the tech giant has patents for smart home devices that can spy on everything happening in our houses. Google’s lame premise for this complete invasion of privacy is to send us targeted advertisements for our “convenience.”
According to PJ Media, what people have already surrendered in terms of privacy fails to even closely rival what Google wants to do. Although the patents aren’t a guarantee the products will be manufactured, they reveal Google desires us to have “sensors and cameras mounted in every room to follow us and analyze what we’re doing throughout our home.”
For instance, the cameras are so sensitive they can recognize the picture of a movie star on a home owner’s t-shirt. The picture can then be matched to the person’s browsing history. The result is that Google can send the home owner an advertisement for a new movie starring his or her favorite actor or actress. All of the data can be analyzed and reported at the tech giant’s discretion.
Patent No. 10,114,351 reads Google may “use smart-devices to monitor activities within a smart-device environment, report on these activities, and/or provide smart-device control based upon these activities.”
The patent also documents how the tech company wishes to track people throughout their residences, spying on them in every room. It says, “By way of example, the high-power processor 20 and the low-power processor 22 may detect when a location (e.g., a house or room) is occupied (i.e., includes a presence of a human), up to and including whether it is occupied by a specific person or is occupied by a specific number of people (e.g., relative to one or more thresholds).”
The patent’s final troubling sentence states, “Moreover, the high-power processor 20 and the low-power processor 22 may include image recognition technology to identify particular occupants or objects.” The tech giant hopes to observe who is occupying each room of our houses, where we’re moving, and what we’re doing.
PJ Media aptly stated, “While there are many good uses for adding sensors for home automation, the danger comes when they are being monitored and used by outside companies with an insatiable desire to know everything about us.”
Even without cameras, Google can utilize speakers to ascertain the noises you make while you’re in your home. The Atlantic noted, “Google can make inferences on your mood based on whether it hears raised voices or crying, on when you’re in the kitchen based on the sound of the fridge door opening, on your dental hygiene based on ‘the sounds and/or images of teeth brushing.’”
As if spying on your every move at home wasn’t enough, Google also wants to track all of your activities at work. According to The Outline, the tech giant submitted a patent earlier this year for a product the application described as “A method and system for automating work pattern quantification.” The innovative product will essentially allow bosses to spy on their employees under the guise of attempting to improve productivity.
The patent application defines a scheme where each task an employee does at his or her workstation is watched and computed into “focus metrics.” The product instantly provides those employees feedback encouraging them to alter their work patterns in order to maximize their productivity.
If the system notices a worker is most productive at 10:00 a.m., it might alert the employee that he or she “may want to block this time off on your calendar in order to maximize your focused time.” While this prompt might seem helpful and innocent enough to some workers, it might feel like a threat to other employees. After all, who’s to say that a worker wouldn’t get fired for disobeying the orders of an intrusive computer system?
According to Fox News, Google already records our movements on our Android devices and iPhones even when we specifically tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation revealed that our beloved devices log our location data even if we’ve utilized a privacy setting that states it will prevent the tech giant from doing so.
Unfortunately, none of this seemingly criminal behavior is regulated. No laws or oversight currently exists to thwart Google and other tech companies from spying on us and selling whatever information they discover to those offering the highest price for it.
