n2itivguy

avon b7 said:

Soli said:

There's absolutely no evidence that this was a working microphone that was eavesdropping on anyone and let's be clear that Alphabet is the one that announced the update that enabled the microphone, not a blogger that discovered nefarious activity. For those looking for a conspiracy you'll have to look harder. This is no different from countless other tech companies that don't disclose inactive HW for a variety of reasons.

I think in this particular case more could have been done to correct the error beforehand.

A team of people were involved in designing, testing and producing the hardware. It is reasonable to think that some of these people would have used the finished product or given it to friends and family. It is unreasonable to assume that none of these people saw that a key (and consumer facing element - even if inactive) got missed on the spec list or in the product documentation.

Also, this feature will have been in internal testing for a while before getting the go ahead to go live which would have provided more opportunities to catch the slip up.

I'm with you that I don't see anything nefarious but it should have got caught and clarified earlier IMO.