Apple’s HomePod is a speaker, a home assistant that records your data
ANALYSIS: Gadgets are mining information on our lives yet most people don’t know or don’t care as they rush to have the latest toys and be connected.
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ALONGSIDE the US and the UK, Australia will be the first market worldwide to get the HomePod in Apple Stores in December this year.
Yes the HomePod’s a speaker but it’s also a home assistant, a digital butler so to speak. It can play music, tell you the weather and even power devices in your home.
But it’s a convenience that comes with a cost and experts warn that embracing the best of digital tools to manage your life can mean risking your privacy, either now or in the future.
People post to social media, track their activities or use digital assistants without thinking of the way that all builds up data of who we are and what we do, and what might happen if that data was misused by either companies selling off the information or hackers gaining access to it.
Non-profit research group Open Effect produced a report last year warning that nearly every major fitness tracker had a security issue which could feasibly allow a hacker to track their movements.
The report named popular devices such as the Fitbit Charge HR and the Garmin Vivosmart as being potential hackable with the Apple Watch being the only one of eight devices tested that passed the test.
MORE: How I brike up with my Fitbit
Data scientist Karl Ricanek Jr of Lapetus Solutions recently warned that several life insurance companies in the US were working on technology to analyse people’s selfies as a way of determining someone’s suitability for life insurance.
Closer to home, Facebook in Australia recently found itself under fire when leaked documents showed it could analyse the mood of teenagers with information that could be used by advertisers to target people when they are at their most vulnerable.
Siri, which studies our daily routine, can give us traffic updates at a glance at our wrist on trips we haven’t yet told it we were about to take and Google’s artificial intelligence tool studies every photo we’ve ever taken to look for landmarks to identify.
And the Amazon Echo Look smart speaker market for now is happy to give us fashion advice on our outfit but won’t rule out in the future selling information on our fashion sense to advertisers.
David Vaile, co-covenor of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Community at the University of NSW, says most consumers don’t stop to consider privacy risks.
“The devices or apps are usually shiny and new, ‘right here, right now’ in front of you in all their promise and coolness, most vendors have no interest in encouraging sober reflection when stoking ‘instant gratification’ is much better for their cash flow, and the risks and costs are often intangible, uncertain, and manifest in another time and place,” he said.
He says consumers need to identify the risks of privacy infringement or data theft before buying a gadget or putting a smart device in their home.
“In many cases you won’t be able to confirm these safety characteristics, and once your data is stolen you can’t get it back,” he said.
“It’s worth considering a cautious approach and let someone else be the bunny who gets totally owned by their cute internet of Things treasure.”
Dr Suelette Dreyfus, a Melbourne University technology lecturer and privacy expert, agrees that consumers need to think about privacy issues before they embrace the rush for living the totally connected life.
“There is a risk this digital diary — of our health status, our geolocational data, our proximity to other specific people’s smartphones, our personal preferences, our pictures of children and boyfriends on social media — could be used for all sorts of purposes that we never intended,” she said.
“And that includes by potential future employers. It also may include health insurers or life insurance companies.
“Do you want them to know from reading your social media pages or your wrist device output that you have a dodgy heartbeat? Or a sibling with an inherited disease? Do you also want future employers to know those things?
“We need privacy not because we are doing anything wrong, but because information is power. And it’s also money.
“All this private information has a monetary value to someone. We act as though our private information has not financial value — that’s the wrong way to view it.
“Companies like Facebook and Google give you enormous free services on their various platforms exactly because that private information you place there is valuable.”
Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, from the Harvard Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, recently took to social media to warn about the dangers of the Amazon Echo Look fashion advice system.
“With this data, Amazon won’t be able to just sell you clothes or judge you. It could analyse if you’re depressed or pregnant and much else,” she warned on Twitter.
“Machine learning algorithms can do so much with regular full length pictures of you. They can infer private things you did not disclose.
“All this to sell you more clothes. We are selling out to surveillance capitalism that can quickly evolve into authoritarianism for so cheap.
“And even if Amazon promised the moon and back in privacy ... name the few big things that haven’t gotten hacked. Yes, that few.”
Jan Dawson, the consumer technology analyst who heads Jackdaw Research, says while there are some people who are aware of the privacy trade-offs in embracing some digital services, there are many others have no idea of the deal they make.
“There absolutely are people who will never buy a Google Home or Amazon Echo because they don’t want those companies listening to what’s going on in their homes, or building profiles on them that could be used to target advertising or drive e-commerce,” he said.
“However, there will be plenty of people in those other two categories — the don’t knows and don’t cares — who won’t see this as a significant selling point.
“The extent to which people fall into those various groups will depend to a great extent on how things play out over the next few years.
“Amazon has so far been very careful on this front, eschewing advertising and making the ties to e-commerce subtle and entirely voluntary.
“Google has already had one misstep with a promotion for a movie and seems willing to make advertising a major facet of how it will monetise Google Home and the Google Assistant.”
Google faced a backlash from some Google Home users in March when they found their smart speaker’s rundown of their day ahead included “by the way, Disney’s live action Beauty and The Beast opens today.”
Google described the plug delivered into people’s audible calendar as not an ad an “experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users”.
In the era of the digital assistant, it sparked cash for comment outrage and Google later admitted “we could have done better in this case”.
Dawson says consumers can embrace the convenience of digital assistants but they need to think about how they trust companies with their data.
“Google builds these profiles in the cloud and does use them to target advertising, while Apple tends to build them on the device and keep them very secure and private.
“So the connection isn’t so much between how much the device knows about you but how that data is collected, where it’s stored, and how it’s used.
“I think it’s perfectly possible to be a smart assistant without threatening privacy, but that has to be a conscious choice on the part of the provider and it depends a great deal on the business model.”
Originally published as Apple’s HomePod is a speaker, a home assistant that records your data
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