Or to put it another way, the idea is to deploy a state-of-the-art environmental sensor platform, with presence detection, the ability to differentiate individuals with high accuracy, microphones, cameras, inside the one remaining legal perimeter (at least in the US) in which a person has "a reasonable expectation of privacy," and to grant it elevated privileges with access to your accounts and agency to act on your behalf, and access to information about people in its presence to a degree of intimacy roughly equivalent to being a member of the family.
This would not be so bad if the consumer were the primary (or better - the only) beneficiary of the personal data collected. But the TOS declares openly that "Google may use the Data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network." So yeah, it's a member of the family. One that hoovers up all your data and delivers it to the vendor, to Google, and to as-yet-unnamed 3rd parties. Short of hooking this thing up to your body and wearing it 24x7, this is almost as invasive as ad-tech could possibly be.
Even if we accept the premise that privacy is a non-issue today, can that continue to hold true as "things" attain unprecedented levels of instrumentation, agency, and presence, and they co-habit our most intimate private spaces?
Second scenario - what if companies like Uber screw it up for everyone else? Uber has been all over the news lately for wanton misuse of the data it has about drivers and customers and the cavalier attitude of top execs bragging about how that data has been or could be used. Anyone who hadn't given much thought to the data held by Uber now has to think twice before they hire a car. But there's nothing special about Uber. It's just another company whose service requires access to data about you. Each app on the phone and connected device is one of these companies. As the number of companies with your data increases, the chance that one of them will act in bad faith increases, eventually to a certainty. A bad enough transgression could become the watershed moment when suddenly consumers care about privacy and dump their accounts en masse like Germans bailing out of What's App.
Even if we accept the premise that privacy is a non-issue today, is it possible that irresponsible companies can abuse the public trust so badly that privacy becomes a top concern for consumers?
What if both of those trends collided? Suppose for example that naked photos taken by Jibo robots in people's bedrooms turned up on the Internet?
(The pitch video shows a Jibo robot next to a young girl's bed as she's about to retire for the night.)
(And I'm not saying the folks at Jibo are of bad character, they just happen to have a device with enormous potential for abuse and it makes a handy example.)
In light of this, do you still believe business models whose revenue depends on continued apathy about privacy are sound long-term strategies? If so, is it because you believe the scenarios described will never change privacy attitudes? Or perhaps that they could, but if and when they do pivoting to a privacy-protecting business model will be no big deal so we needn't be concerned at all today? Or maybe that the scenarios I've outlined are inconsequential?
Kind regards,
-- T.Rob
T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
IoPT Consulting, LLC
+1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text
+44 (0) 8714 089 546 Voice
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently interviewed six leading marketers (P&G, Unilever, etc) for their opinions about how marketing will change over the next five years. Out of the interviews they distilled 15 principles that marketers should be paying attention to. Principle No11 is 'Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought'. Sounds familiar?
Economist Intelligence Unit