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Large commercial posters have covered the floors and walls of Oslo Central Station for several weeks. Google Home has finally arrived in Norway and may be the Christmas present of the year. Google has created a product that can decode the Norwegian verb language. I have read the product description:
"Google Home Mini is a small, discreet and intelligent speaker with Google Assistant in Norwegian. It allows you to manage smart products like TV, music and lighting with voice, and it can, for example, tell you what your calendar or weather looks like. "
In addition: "Let the kids ask Google Home Mini everything they're wondering, otherwise we'll tell them a story?"
Listening station
I feel a nauseous agitation. What kind of stories? What kind of worldview and values will Google convey to my children? How can I at least know what my children are exposed to? How can I restrict the access of market forces to the privacy of my children?
Google Home aims to position Google as the new e-commerce game. Leketøysgiganten Mattel has tried to launch a version of the same technology aimed at children in 2017. This would give parents "the most advanced artificial intelligence technology that allows them to protect, develop and maintain the most important good of their home: their children ".
The manufacturer has met with massive resistance, including a signature campaign and criticism from US politicians. That ended with Mattel pulling the pitch. In the signature campaign, it was written: This product gives Mattel the opportunity to build a complete profile of children and their families. Never before has a product had such an intimate capacity to snuggle into the child's life.
It's gone too far.
Can we rely on manufacturers?
Part of the reason was that technology was aimed at children, but we should also be concerned about children's use of this technology for adults. Amazon and Google have even positioned these products as family friendly. Both products are activated by a "word of sleep": "Alexa" for Amazon and "Hello Google" for Google.
Unless you use the mechanical switch or the remote, the product always listens to the word to wake it up. Amazon's "Alexa" stores 60 seconds of audio recordings in memory in this Hibernate mode at any time. For Google Home, they do not specify in their privacy statement how many seconds they say "a few seconds".
We should be interested in what happens to these recordings. They may contain information about whether you are listening to music or news, a familiar conversation, or how to comfort your child.
According to Amazon, these records are permanently deleted, so that only 60 seconds are stored at any time. Are these data still in one form or another? Silicon Valley says no. The question is whether we can count on it.
Strong market interests may use such information, and patent applications involve products and services that may use this information.
Information can be misused
Parents can not exclude that this technology has access to confidential confidential information and can be used for economic or other purposes. A similar abuse of information has already taken place. The biggest scandal, perhaps even the most important, concerned Cambridge Analytics using Facebook data and their use in the US election campaign.
I'm not saying that Google, Facebook and Amazon will wash our children's brains and control future policy choices, but we build profiles based on digital information, and research shows that children are particularly influenced by advertising and social media.
We are used to paying for comfort and availability. We are happy to earn our money and our private data every day. Secondly, we should not neglect the problematic consequences, even if it brings short-term benefits. Especially when it comes to our children.
Healthy skepticism
Google Home is only the first in a series of future artificial intelligence products based on language recognition.
But today, unfortunately, we are not doing enough to protect the privacy of our children and their emotional and cognitive development in the face of such technology.
I work myself with artificial intelligence. It goes without saying that I am not an opponent of new technologies. It is not the technology itself that is problematic, but how we use it. We are responsible people for how it affects our world and our children.
So we have the responsibility to ask questions, raise objections, and decide what is acceptable and what is not.
As a technology, I want to talk about technology with my future kids and experience them. I want to promote reasonable use, but also skeptical attitudes.
As parents, we need knowledge and open discussion to better understand artificial intelligence, its consequences and how to enable our children to use it in a healthy way.
This will obviously be worth it, it is our children!
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