The distinction is that when you visit a place of business, the data is under the control of the business owner.

When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.

Therefore, Google has a WAY bigger responsibility than most people realize, once they decided to collect this data.

You are assuming that the business doesn't use a third party monitoring firm.

Ultimately, whenever you visit any place, business or home, the data is under the control of the owner and anyone they abdicate those rights to.

I tend to agree, though I tried to do some searches for a law citation here, but struggled to find anything concrete. I imagine this will be a big area of research and exploration for law in the coming years.

Some interesting scenarios to consider: If I visit a friend's house, and I start getting targeted ads for a service I didn't subscribe to without prior consent or my knowledge, can I sue her/him? What about a scenario where some service collects my data, said service is hacked, and someone commits identity theft on me, who is liable for damages? Do I need my buddy to sign a waiver when he visits to play some Xbox for a bit?

> When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.

But it was your friend's decision to delegate that control. So, Google having that control is still a consequence of your friend's control.

Do you normally use your friends' wifi? I do that when it's family, but generally not with my friends (don't do LAN parties anymore).

With LTE, I don't need wifi.

Wasn't there a story recently about android phones still being tracked and tracking wifi hotspots even with wifi turned off? I believe location services still works pretty well even with GPS and wifi off.

I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.

Yes, there was recently a question of how Android knew someone's location with such high resolution, even when wifi and GPS were both turned off. The answer was a passive probing of wifi identifiers and using those against the Google SID to location database even when wifi was turned off.

There was even a note about this feature in the privacy policy, IIRC.

Makes you wonder how reliable airplane mode is.

Airplane mode doesn't turn off the radios, IIRC; it just stops transmissions.

Rumor is that even when your phone has been turned off, it can be turned back on remotely.

Perhaps people should be required to post a notice on their front door if their house has a Google surveillance device in it (or I suppose, verbally inform every visitor). It's common (and often required) for businesses to post notice that people on the premises are under video surveillance.

I have a couple of cameras, and at least one visitor has been uncomfortable with their presence, despite the fact they're not sending the data to a third party.

> If you visit a place of business you are potentially under surveillance. I'm sure there is a distinction but I'm failing to come up with it right now.

A business is typically located in a public space, where there is no expectation of privacy. In contrast, a home is by definition a private space where there is a strong expectation of privacy.

Exactly! In a public space, you can expect someone to be collecting data about you, even if it's only photographing you in the background. In a private space, you expect no one to be collecting data about you, except the people you are directly interacting with.

Aren't there some wiretapping laws around this sort of thing?

This seems a bit analogous to the treatment of attorney-client privilege (at least in the US.) If I have a discussion with my attorney in my house, or in my attorney's office, with no one else there, the conversation is generally privileged. If I have that conversation in the presence of a third party, the conversation is no longer privileged. So, if I'm in someone else's house, I may have implicitly consented to the fact that I don't control the environment and can no longer assume the same level of privacy.

(IANAL, YMMV, etc.)

A home may be a private space but it isn't <i>your</i> space. When entering someone else's space you open yourself up to having to abide by their rules, listen to their music, and be captured by their cameras.

Its one thing to be under surveillance by a grocery store's security cameras and another thing when those cameras are sending all your data to the same central organization. Right now we aren't that great at integrating all that data — knowing that I'll be in a certain bar on Sunday nights is a little disconcerting, but if I knew that was the limit of AI assistants' invasiveness I'd be embracing it for the convenience. But technology for AI and data processing will improve, and data gathering will become more pervasive and more centralized, and soon megacorps will have a much more complete profile of you that they can query if ever they or one of their employees develops malicious intent (not to mention the non-malicious actions that can cause harm).

Tl;dr there's privacy in decentralization.

There's privacy in decentralization but you have to recognize that for many of us, there's value in openness.

I'm very optimistic about Google making my life better in lots of little ways. I have virtually no concerns about my openness to Google causing me trouble.

"making my life better in lots of little ways"

I think that's a common goal and widespread belief and find its implication of having given up on "bigger ways" troubling.

Our industry was going to change the world. Rewrite the cultural rules of socializing. Rebuild the economy in a new form. Encourage major cultural and political shifts by empowering the little guy. Bring knowledge to the ignorant, companionship to the lonely, power to the powerless, jobs to the jobless.

What we have now is, well, maybe, with some luck, timidly, sometimes google can analyze the last time I went to a gas station, the number of miles I've driven at various speeds since then, the time of my next appointment, then it can adjust my google now card to encourage me to leave home earlier so I'll have time to fill up the tank and it'll find the cheapest advertised price along the way. That's nice ... but wheres my revolution?

Even worse in context of the article, OK well say I have to give up all privacy and go hard core 1984 telescreen big brother is always watching, to save endangered species and house the homeless and feed the starving and bring peace to the victimized. Well OK I'll think about it. Oh wait, we don't get any of that, all we're offered is slightly better appointment scheduling. Eh, no thanks.

Nothing is ever really new, and this era is likely similar to pre-quantum era Physics around 1890 where nothing is left to discover other than adding a few more decimal places here and there. The meme and speech patterns are all the same (although I'm not quite that old)

While it doesn't seem like that much of a revolution, things have changed significantly.

For centuries, people have navigated using stars and maps, yet now you have turn by turn navigation in your pocket with real time traffic and crowd sourced traffic incidents. You can reach most of the world population instantly by dialing a few numbers or even sending them a text message or mms, no matter where they are.

In the context of the article, a couple of years ago, Google Now told me I had to leave for a meetup in my calendar that I completely forgot about, gave me transit directions for a part of a city I've never been at and got me in exactly at the meetup start time.

While that all seems like modern conveniences nowadays, even thirty years ago if you'd have told people that you couldn't get lost anywhere in the world and could get ahold of just about anyone at anytime instantly, they'd think you'd be talking about science fiction, not today's reality.