Google says Nest’s built-in mic not listed in specs was not meant to be secret

I doubt the landlord said the tenant couldn't put up a second fire alarm.

The tech crowd are their first customers. There's no downside to listing the microphone, so why not do it?

Contrast this to Amazon: during design of the original Echo at Lab126, an engineering discussion took place where they determined that implementing the mute function in software would be less expensive in terms of component requirements than implementing a physical disconnect of the mic circuit.

The engineering team refused to take the less expensive route, and insisted that the mute button physically disconnect the circuit, so that no future engineering team could decide to stealth "unmute" the microphone through software.

To this day, you can disassemble an Amazon Echo device and you will find a physical disconnect of the mic circuitry when you push the mute button. Don't want an "always listening" smart speaker? Just keep it muted, and a red LED circle informs you that the mic is physically disconnected.

I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization.

Disclaimer: I'm a principal engineer at Amazon.

Puh-lease...

Product Marketing does not 'document' they position, and write about features. If the 'mic' isn't part of feature or proposition, why would it even be in their radar?

The '1st order' response of marketing doing their job is 'who cares?'. Few people care about tech tidbits that are not user oriented.

There's already tons of things to worry about and address - and every single bit of copy takes up valuable space.

The issue also does not fit into the standard communications framework: Hey, should we should tell people that there is a microphone, even if it is not working and does nothing? How do we even do that? "Hey, your alarm has a microphone!" Wouldn't that seem odd, why does it have a microphone?! You'd even have to kind of explain it: "Your product has a microphone so that one day in the future, you might enable some other features that don't exist yet"

"this has privacy implications" - no - it only has the perception of privacy implications. Because Google is not actually intervening on people's privacy, it's unlikely they really thought about the need to give people an unneeded affirmation.

Maybe they had a discussion about it, maybe it just didn't rise to the level of 'very important'.

Only with a very specific concern for a subgroup of customers who are wary of these things, would someone have enough leverage to get that "Hey, there's a microphone that does nothing!" notice on the box.

Google is not doing specific evil. They are not trying to infiltrate your homes and take nude pictures of you so they can look at them or sell them.

They are systematically evil, in the sense that it makes sense for them to sell you voice/video features that you want in order that they might provide you even better services. And their AI will use nudies of you in a backwards way to learn more about you.

They're getting evil due to their scope of influence, and negative externalities, much like FB has problems with 'Russian interference in elections' - i.e. not a problem they are trying to create, not a problem they want, just a sensitive byproduct of their product and massive success.