Is there really any doubt that google can and will spy on you if given the slightest opportunity?
I also think this kind of paranoia is detrimental to our evolution as a species.
We should be sharing more, not hiding in our caves.
You can not possibly examine the evidence and claim 100% that there is no interest in spying on anyone.
Doubt that this particular case has that as the core issue? Sure. But be utterly convinced that literally no one, in any intelligence agency, against any target that might be near some sort of microphone-enabled device, has ever had the thought cross their mind that these things might be useful? No intelligence agency has ever looked at one of these companies hoovering up all the data they can get and installing all this stuff everywhere they can and stroked their chin for a moment?
You're basically claiming the NSA, CIA, Mossad, KGB, MI5, and all other such things have never existed, do not exist, and will not exist. The evidence for this is pretty poor.
I'm not asking you to wake up tomorrow and worry about whether your toaster is secretly sending all your thoughts to the alien overlords, but come on. Live in the world a bit. We're 7-ish billion people here on Planet Earth and they are not anywhere near all to a person nice, wholesome people who wish you all the best and would never even dream of exploiting you even a tiny little bit while they joyously enable you on your life journey of exploration and wonder. You're begging for exploitation.
I suggest you start, your profile here is even slimmer than mine.
More seriously: while there surely is some paranoia going on, recent events have made me more careful, not less.
Ironic coming from a non-eponymous account, and in an era when we share two orders of magnitude more stuff than any other, even pictures of what food we had at diner...
Really? Did you ever hear of a guy named Snowden? Do you understand that our government spends tens of billions of dollars annual to spy on people? Do you understand that Google, Facebook and every other search, advertising and social media company have billion-dollar business models based almost entirely on surveillance and information hashing? I hope you are being sarcastic here.
The Spanish Inquisition would certainly agree.
On one end you have individuals who will find nearly any conspiracy viable for whatever reason. That most conspiracy theories are eventually shown to be false doesn't really seem to bother them. On the other end you have individuals that will never believe anything could possibly be true, so long as a government or corporation has plausible deniability. The lengthy list of conspiracy theories that turned out to be true, or other conspiracies that nobody knew of - only revealed decades after due to declassification, don't really seem to bother them.
I suppose we could call both ends naive. Naively trusting to naively untrusting. The 'right' degree of scrutiny is somewhere in the middle. In this case you have the largest ad delivery corporation in the world. They've "accidentally" engaged in behavior such as snooping and logging data from unsecured wifi connections with their street view vehicles, continued to track users' locations on Android devices even when tracking was "disabled", and so on. Google is also one of the companies that known is known to be collaborating with intelligence agencies including, but not limited to, the NSA. Most recently they were one of the first companies fined for refusing to abide the GDPR regulations for a variety of actions including lack of legal basis for the information they were collecting, lack of transparency in what/how it was collected, and enrolling users in tracking without their permission. And while not directly related, I think it speaks to the true character and ethos of the company that one of the words they plan/planned to black-list in their tracking enabled censorship driven search engine in China is literally "human rights." [1]
And now they "accidentally" forgot to include on the packaging information that an internet connected device installed centrally within homes also had a recording device. I mean given the context of who you're talking about where do you think the idea that this device, and omission might be less the benign, ranks on the scale of 'naively trusting -> naively untrusting' scale? The connotation of conspiracy theory, as in your usage, is implying it's naively untrusting. I do not think this is a logical conclusion.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-...
Which "conspiracy theories" are eventually shown to be false?
The ones concerning aliens and lizard overloads or illuminati?
Because there are plenty corporate, political, and economic conspiracies going on all the time, including tons of "conspiracy to commit fraud/murder/etc" at smaller and larger scales, as acknowledged by courts of justice every single day.
Needless to say this did not come to pass.
Another one I found amusing was people believing that SpaceX's retropulsive landings, when they were first being successfully executed, were actually just launches played back in reverse. This conspiracy died pretty fast after they did it over and over, to say nothing of people being able to freely go and watch the landings. But it could also be shown to be false beyond any doubt by reversing the landing footage which, suffice to say, looked nothing like a takeoff. There were also more technical ways to debunk these things such as by looking at individual phenomena (birds, etc). It wasn't a good conspiracy theory, but there were plenty of people that believed it for a while.
But yeah, I'm not really sure what's up with people who seem to think that conspiracies don't happen and on an extremely regular basis. Even some absolutely awful things. Operation Northwoods [2] was very much a real idea that made it way all the way through the intelligence agencies and joint chiefs of staff. It was literally one signature away from being carried out. If we had a president of lesser moral character, not only would it likely have been carried out but we'd probably be none the wiser today. JFK was a great man.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theori...
Conspiracys is not a nutcase dellusion it happens all the time but the term is somehow tainted, which in itself is somewhat of a conspiracy...
"the microphone has never been on", Google say about a passive device as it matters. More accurate would be "we did not record the microphone" but that might sound bad ...
It is in no way close to conspiracy to question if Google or any other company supported by Targeted Ads where they need massive amounts of Human Intelligence to perfect their ad targeting, would want to spy on their consumers
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a145332...
Is this maybe?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/23/google-ea...
Is this?
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/heres-amazon-say-investigating...
Perhaps this?
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/09/smart-tvs-are-sp...
That said, "conspiracy territory" gets close to a knee jerk reaction.
History is full of conspiracies.
A conspiracy is just many people doing each other favors under the table and taking covert action to promote their private interests or political beliefs, something which happens all the time.
Heck, didn't a President resign because he conspired (including eavesdropping) against the other party?
Wasn't another in bed with mafia leaders? [2]
Haven't a third had friends profiteering of a trillion+ dollar war effort (Haliburton, etc), even using false testimony [3, 4]?
Don't tons of ex-politicians usually end up on boards of private companies they helped pass favorable legislation for and done favors to?
Haven't large corporations strong-armed whole nations, toppled governments, pushed for their own lackeys, etc [5]?
Wasn't the head of the FBI targeting, spying on, and blackmailing his personal opponents and for his personal gain? [6]
Just to mention a few examples, just the tip of the iceberg...
As Gore Vidal once wrote: "Americans have been trained by the media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of the word "conspiracy," because for an American to believe in a conspiracy, he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder" (Gore Vidal)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/07/michaelellison [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton#Controversies [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
