At Google’s most recent glitzy presentation, at it’s “I/O” developers
conference, the company showed off new apps and features for many of its
products, but what was most striking was the technology underlying it.
Building on what it has shown previously, it demonstrated how advanced
its machine learning techniques were, specifically their ability to
understand and process natural language. And as Google Photos ably
demonstrates, the technology is already increasingly good at recognising
objects in photos.

Moments after demonstrating this level of intelligence, the company
revealed a new product called *Google Home*. This is a speaker that sits
in your home and will respond to voice commands. In other words, it will
listen to everything you say – using those advanced language processing
abilities to figure out what you’re requesting. Google isn’t the only
company working on this – Amazon, Facebook and others are all working on
similar technology.

Whether the company realises it or not, it is building the tools for
perfect surveillance. Thanks to Google and the rest of the modern tech
industry, the Internet of Things could easily become the Internet of
Tyranny.

You don’t have to think too hard to imagine how this same technology
could be used for surveillance, especially when considering the
technologies that we know governments are already employing in the wake
of the Edward Snowden revelations.

If there’s a microphone in every home, listening to everything we do,
and some intelligent algorithms at work picking up on keywords and
phrases, it would be easily for an aspiring totalitarian government to
use such technologies to prevent legitimate political opposition, and
not just crime. If a sufficiently malevolent government wanted to employ
such surveillance it would make the East German secret police look like
amateurs.
[...]

<http://www.alphr.com/technology/1003552/google-might-just-have-built-the-internet-of-tyranny>


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