arien

Who would back up their phone to the cloud if they were involved in illegal activities?

This is going to bite more innocent people through false positives than criminals who already know how to get away with these things.

Might have, judging from this story.

It didn't have to be binding, just advisory or symbolic with no action to be taken. It might have prevented most of the current situation if the result had been to remain (which would have been most likely, back then, now I'm not so sure). If it had been independence I suppose we would be in a very similar situation.

What about the Instagram and WhatsApp apps? Do they behave the same way?

The explicit consent request is what they can do. It should have been there from the start, but better late than never.

Anything that falls in that 'personal data' segment above that belongs to me has to be obtained with my prior, explicit consent. And these bits of data with my name or other details in them must be included if I send Google a "right to be forgotten" or "show me all the data you've got about me" request. That's GDPR in a nutshell.

This might be a grey area for now, as both GDPR and listening devices are both quite new. But Google, Amazon & co aren't super popular with EU regulators and governments, so they might side with users' rights on this one.

But in this particular case, it's the company doing the recordings, not the owner of the device, so it's a slightly different situation, in my opinion.

That said... The owner could be liable if for example it were necessary to explicitly inform of the existence of such devices the possibility of being recorded.

Not in the case of the device being someone else's. I don't have any Google or Amazon smart listeners, so I never accepted them. Yet if my voice is in any of these recordings, well...

Doesn't mean you can use live data for tests. Should be opt-out by default, with the chance to opt-in if you wish to collaborate with your data.

And not to be anywhere near anyone else's listening devices.

Isn't there a law in some US states that there needs to be consent before recording someone? How does this fit in and who would be held responsible, the owner of the listening device or the company behind it?

I'm guessing it's some kind of A/B testing done by Amazon. Do people trust in the Amazon brand, or do they rather buy from unknown brands that offer cheap but decent quality (compared to the cheap and poor quality counterparts that flood the site)? Each brand is probably there to answer a specific question (or set of).

Yeah, I've seen those, but they are slightly different and have been available for a few years already (I believe before 2014, the date of this project, but I could be wrong).

I'm glad to see on the other reply that the plan hasn't been scrapped. Some of the lines could really use new trains (with proper air ventilation/filtering, especially).