Wow… Google fined a whopping $68 MILLION DOLLARS for eavesdropping on people’s spoken conversations. That’ll teach them! It’s going to take Google a whole hour and a half to make that money back. I guess they won’t be pulling shit like this anymore after feeling that sort of pain. We really showed ‘em this time, eh?
Correction: it’s not even a fine; it’s a settlement with no admission of wrongdoing. So even worse.
@aral like others said, not a fine. But the general point stands.
@aral Oh Google absolutely listens. I have a 2018 Google home max speaker, and back in 2021 I was having a phone conversation on speaker phone while sitting next to it. I said I wanted to monetize my autism blog by selling products to help autistic adults but I didn't know how to do that. The next morning my entire YouTube app feed was nothing but dropshipping and print on demand videos. That did result in me starting The Autistic Innovator though.
Another time in 2021 I had a mental breakdown next to the speaker, and the next day my YouTube app was all encouraging videos related to what was in the speaker phone conversation. Gemini didn't exist back then, so I think it was an actual human at Google listening to me.
@AutisticInnovator What’s even scarier is that even if they weren’t listening to what you said, they have enough of a realtime view of you from everything you do around the web and off (they also buy data from brokers and brick and mortar stores, etc.), they’d still know.
While I wouldn’t put it past them to hire cheap labour in far off lands to do this (we have many examples of firms pulling similar Mechanical Turk moves), even without Gemini, they could’ve been using simple speech to text and heuristics.
@aral It's a voluntary settlement, not a fine, and Google hasn't been found to do, or admitted to do, what has been claimed.
RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116000462944591897
@aral Alphabet ran 230 billion profit in the period septebmer 2024-september 2025. So a 68 million fine scaled back to my yearly income (let's pretend all my income is profit) would mean a fine of about 15 dollars.
It's meaningless. That's not a fine, that's a very low fee for being allowed to ignore the law. Until these fines are calculated as a percentage of the revenue ( not profit!), nothing will change.
Well said. Demand our journalists write headlines with “percentage of gross/net profits” or, like you use, “days/hours to recoup”
Raw “amount paid” is largely meaningless at the scale at which these companies operate
@aral We finally need to put some people in jail, or make them pay out of their personal pockets instead of company pocket.
@aral they don't even pay these fines. https://todon.nl/@prolrage/113113105176517385
Which is why we need criminal liability for executives of companies that engage in illegal practices.
@aral And if it pans like the Apple lawsuit, the affected users can look forward to google buying them a coffee in compensation.
big brain 🧠: change the “m” to a “b”
Galaxy brain ✨🧠✨: make it an antitrust violation for the advertising company to also sell hardware that can eavesdrop on you in order to show you more ads
