Feel really guilty, my one family member gave me this. I don’t use much google stuff anymore and I really dislike the company as it gets more intrusive. Is there anything I can do with this thing besides give it away? Nothing is worse than getting a gift that you can’t use.
Just return it. I’m sure they’ll understand. And it’s the thought that matters.
What thought? They clearly know nothing about OP and didn’t put any actual thought in. Lol
I work in IT and my whole family knows I’m privacy centric. None of them would have even thought about the privacy concerns with a smart speaker. That doesn’t mean that they don’t know me, it’s that they are ignorant to tech and cyber security. It’s not a stretch to think that OP’s gift giver knows OP will enough to give them an expensive gift but didn’t think of all of the implications, because that’s foreign to them.
Every time I talked about privacy concerns with these devices on Reddit, I got a deluge of “oh they don’t listen all the time” and “oh they don’t send anything home”. Insanity.
I received one as a gift years ago and it’s still in the box. I should give it to someone.
Yeah, exactly. Zero thought.
“Oh, techy thing! Perfect for techy person!”
Absolute brainless gift.
That’s different than not knowing anything about OP. That’s not knowing tech or not knowing extreme specifics about OP. The giver knows OP well enough that they thought a tech gift fits them, which makes sense. Most people don’t think twice about smart devices and security because most people are ignorant.
There may have been lots of thought put into the gift, like OP likes tech, perhaps they’re into music, maybe they have a Google phone, or they have lots of fancy gadgets. A popular smart speaker sounds like a good gift for that person to someone that’s not security minded.
Someone close enough to be expected to gift, but distant enough to not know them well and only know “they like techy stuff”.
Like, I get that it isn’t the best gift for OP, and I dont presume to know their relational status with the gift giver, but there are plenty of ways this could be a well-intentioned thoughtful gift that just didn’t hit the mark…
That’s what my friend said too. I work in the tech industry, but gosh do I find it creepy more and more. And if you talk about it being pervasive, you get called paranoid.
Yeah, it’s super creepy. We’re literally harvested for data to be sold for profit. Disgusting.