|
In The News |
|
October 13 - Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest To Hand Over Data 300 Times
Article: MiscellaneousAnyone pumped for this week's launch of Google's Home Hub might want to temper their excitement. A smart home is a surveilled home. That’s been the concern of privacy activists since citizens started lighting up their abodes with so-called “smart” tech in recent years.
Take Google’s current smart home division, Nest Labs. It’s been told to hand over data on 300 separate occasions since 2015. That’s according to a little-documented transparency report from Nest, launched a year after the $3.2 billion Google acquisition. The report shows around 60 requests for data were received by Google’s unit in the first half of this year alone. In all those cases recorded from 2015 onward, governments have sought data on as many as 525 Nest account holders.
The Nest transparency report isn’t as detailed as its parent company’s or those of other tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter. It doesn’t give specific numbers on data requests, for instance, only a bar chart where the user is left to guess at precise figures. It also doesn’t drill down to what countries made what requests. Nest didn’t respond to requests for more specific data. With a lack of specificity within Nest’s own reporting on government data grabs, users could be forgiven for asking for more. They may not even know that Nest is handing over customer information in the first place.
Greg Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that while it was positive that the feds required a warrant in the case uncovered by Forbes, customers could be better informed on what’s happening with their privacy. “People who use Nest must be told that very private information about what is happening in their homes is being recorded and could be shared, without prior notice, with law-enforcement when it obtains proper legal process. “Google should also inform users of its data retention policies and, in the case of sensitive Nest data, dispose of it in a short time frame that is noticed to users.”
Other smart home tech has been of use to cops, though there remain few examples. In 2016, Amazon was served with a search warrant demanding recordings from an Echo device in the trial of James Andrew Bates, who was accused of murder. Amazon fought the order, but gave up in early 2017, handing over what recordings it had. The case against Bates was later dismissed.
|