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Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2017 11:38:04 EDT Mike Gerwitz Google Home Mini recording nearly everything in a user's home 24/7 due to a hardware malfunction:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/10/google-nerfing-home-minis-mine-spied-everything-said-247/
I'm not a tinfoil hat person---I don't _need_ to be; there's plenty of legitimate concern out there (https://mikegerwitz.com/talks/sapsf.pdf). I accept their explanation that it was a hardware malfunction on a touch component; it wouldn't make sense for them to intentionally do this type of thing, especially when users can see logs, transcripts, and audio recordings.
The privacy (and security) issue is that this is even possible to begin with. A bug isn't necessary: the firmware can be remotely updated in a targeted attack or compromised by attackers. Audio is being send to remote servers, not being processed on the device.