Google touts privacy options, but still depends on your data

Google’s latest phone and smart-home devices came packd with a t-so-subtle mess: Google cares about your privacy. Does it? tech company has h a complicated relationship with user information in past. Google’s latest steps offer consumers some ditional protections, although it’s unclear how much more secure users will feel. Google unveiled a new Pixel smartphone and or hardware devices on Tuesday, all aimed at getting people more hooked on services powered by company’s Google Assistant and or artificial-intelligence techlogy.

But privacy has emerged as a bigger issue with se products thanks to growing popularity of always-listening “smart speakers” and similar devices. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have all recently ackwledged employing human contractors to listen to and transcribe some voice recordings captured by AI software. Most such AI work, from interpreting voice requests to answering questions to turning on your lights, takes place in cloud, t on your device. Users have very little control of what happens to ir data in cloud.

On Tuesday, though, Google emphasised that much of what you do on its new phones will stay re. Its new facial recognition unlock feature won’t transmit details to Google servers for processing, for instance, and its Assistant can also handle many queries directly on phone. A new recording transcription feature and rar techlogy that recognises gestures are also done on device.

“You need to kw what your data is safe,” Rick Osterloh, Google senior vice president of hardware, said at company’s New York launch event Tuesday. “When computing is always available, designing for computing and privacy becomes more important than ever.”

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'End game is trying to target you with vertising'

Apple and Amazon have also emphasised ir privacy commitments at recent product launches. goal is to give people more choice over privacy settings, Osterloh said. Nest speakers and cameras w come with physical switches to turn off cameras and mics, for example. Still, Google relies heavily on customer information to build user-specific profiles it uses to target digital vertising, which produces vast majority of its income.

Assistant, akin in basic function to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, is emerging as Google’s latest digital data collector. It can learn more about you from your queries and can direct you to or Google services such as maps and search, which also feed into Google’s multi-billion dollar vertising business.

“ir end game is trying to collect all this data and target you with vertising,” said Victoria Petrock, principal analyst at eMarketer. “ voice is a whole new way to capture people’s behaviours.”

Google will t launch Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL in India

more helpful Assistant becomes, more likely people are to use it. On hardware front, Google’s new Pixel 4 features a fancier camera that will recognise people who’ve appeared previously in your photos in order to automatically focus on m in new shots. new phone also comes with motion-sensing techlogy that allows people to skip songs or switch apps by gesturing near phone.

Pixel 4 will carry a starting price tag of $799 — $100 more than  entry-level iPhone 11 — and will go on sale Oct. 24. larger XL version will cost $899, or about $200 less than similar-sized iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Google’s phones have been well reviewed, but have yet to make much of a splash in market dominated by Apple, Huawei and Samsung. In fact, Google’s hardware products have never been big moneymakers. Rar, y offer a way for Google to showcase its money-making services. company also unveiled true wireless earbuds, called Pixel Buds, Google’s answer to Apple’s AirPods. new model, which will go on sale early next year for $179, does away with wire that connects two buds.

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Google introduced Nest Mini, smaller version of its smart speaker. It comes out next Tuesday for $49. Google’s refreshed Wi-Fi router, Nest Wi-Fi, will be available in coming weeks for $269. A new Pixelbook Go laptop goes on sale in January starting at $649. Google hardware team, including many former Google Glass engineers, work from a light-filled, architecturally impressive building near company’s main campus in Mountain View, California.

building is complete with a “color lab” for finding perfect device hues, a materials library for all sorts of elemental inspiration and a small model shop to build device protos on site.

“We started by defining what it feels like to hold Google in your hands,” hardware design executive Ivy Ross said. “ good thing about coming a little bit late to hardware arena is you get to stand back and look at everyone else.”

One of challenges this time around was finding a way to make products more sustainable, a feat especially table on Nest Mini, which has a “fabric” casing me of yarn created from plastic water bottles.