Creepy Or Creepy? Google Home Mini Found To Be Recording Everything 24/7 And Sending It To Google

The Home Mini, Google's donut-shaped Amazon Echo Dot rival, is cute, teensy, and adorable. Looking at its inviting fabric covered-design and the array of funky colors it comes in, one would think it's a pretty harmless piece of technology.

But it might be harboring an alarming privacy concern.

Google Home Mini: Why Is It Recording Everything?

Android Police's Artem Russakovskii was reviewing the Google Home Mini. Everything was going fine at first; the product was working perfectly as intended. That is until he noticed something pretty strange: It was waking up thousands of times a day, recording, then sending those clips to Google's servers. All this was done quietly, Russakovskii said, with the four LED lights on the unit firing on and off unbeknownst to him.

He came to this conclusion after experiencing certain mishaps with the Google Home Mini, in which the smart speaker would fail to pick up on commands. So, Russakovskii visited Google's My Activity portal on the web and made a startling discovery.

There, clear as day, were thousands of items, each with a play button and a timestamp — recordings. Russakovskii's Home Mini review unit was recording everything, and it all happened without his knowledge.

Smart speakers, the Google Home Mini included, are designed to respond to a specific wake word. The default wake words for Google's devices are "OK Google" or "Hey Google." Only when either of these two is uttered by the user will the speaker respond. This is also the only point where the device begins recording, and that clip will be sent to...
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