Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A possible subtext to what you have written is that your employer (google) was mandating that you keep using the device at home as part of your employment... but that is outrageous and I would like clarification as I feel it cannot be true. The requirement to use a Google device at home has never been imposed to the best of my knowledge, at least unless this individual was working on the product. Even then they wou…
What’s important from a user perspective is that it’s not possible to verify these safety measures, while potentially exposing some of the most private pieces of information. I agree that usually it should be safe and anyone messing with logs would probably get terminated, but there’s not much more than to trust people there and I’m not sure all safeguards hold in all cases, e.g., if people were to collude within the…
I'd say that's important for a very tiny subset of users. For most users, the main question is whether the devices are useful. I have them, and I'm not sure myself.
For the users who would want to verify that their stuff isn't being used any way they don't like, it's hard to say what could practically be done to convince them. Even if Google explained the inner workings of its privacy protection systems in detail (and it has, in some various contexts), you still can't watch the code running and verify that it's doing what Google says. Short of building from source and running it yourself, there's no way to verify that things are behaving as you desire. Not using devices in this class is the only option, I guess, at least until it becomes practical to move all the computation on prem, and until someone has an economic incentive to build a system with that feature.