Google Nest: People flood to take up Spotify deal despite joking that they don't know what it is and will spy on them
Users said they signed up for the deal without knowing anything about it
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Your support makes all the difference.Spotify users have taken to social media to make fun of the streaming service’s promotional offer of a Google Nest Mini.
In a partnership between the two companies, new and existing customers to its premium service can claim a free Nest Mini smart speaker.
On Twitter, subscribers have joked that they will get the voice-assistant speaker despite not knowing what it actually is, and made fun of the idea the assistant would spy on them.
“I’d never even heard of a google nest mini until I saw they were free and they instantly became everything I wanted in life,” one person tweeted.
“I had no desire for a google nest until I saw it was free,” said another.
Another person tweeted that they wanted the free speaker but that their “inner conspiracy theorist is telling me no".
“Google Nest is free so the illuminati can eavesdrop in your house how do I get one,” joked one user.
Google Home devices are built to only respond to its active "wake words" such as "Ok, Google" or "Hey, Google". But a number of incidents have played into the idea that smart assistants could be listening when it was not expected.
Last month, Google accidentally enabled a feature for Google Home users which let the smart speaker listen to the sounds of objects in your house.
This allows the speaker to detect sounds like smoke alarms or smashed glass and send a notification to its users phone. The feature was enabled by mistake through a recent software update.
In 2019, the company installed hidden microphones in its Nest Secure alarm system, but the addition had been left off the box and the product’s web page because of an “error”.
It also had human listeners hear "snippets" of private recordings made by users in order to improve responses.
Notions that tech products are listening in have survived for years, fuelled by the conspiracy theory that users smartphones passively listen to users’ conversations in order to send them targetted adverts.
In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “conspiracy theory that gets passed around, that we listen to what’s going on on your microphone and we use that for ads. We don’t do that.“
Hyper-targetted adverts are instead the result of social media companies' ad networks, which gather huge amounts of data on their users.
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