Do these people have no idea how much they are annoying their own customers?
I just bought a google home (it's only just been released here), and if it either plays me adverts, or other adverts (ab)use it - I will return it to the store without hesitation.
This was not sold as an ad-supported service.
To take an extreme position - Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act - they've just performed a distributed denial of service attack on google's servers by using thousands of peoples google devices simultaneously without their permission.
Also - this is a key reason why google need to spend some time on supporting custom hot words for google home. 'OK google' and 'Alexa' are the audio equivalent of IoT devices with a default 'username:admin, password:password' on your network.
A verbal request from your TV is pretty much equivalent to typing in an URL "by hand", and AFAIK people got sacked under CFAA for the latter, because of "unauthorized" access to data.
In my layman's opinion, there's a potential for a case here.
Correct. Example: this user logged into my service. Let's try to log into gmail with the same password. It worked. I'm authenticated, but not authorized.
AT&T won the unauthenticated iPad emails thing, putting weev in prison. As far as i can tell, i have to divine the intentions of the owner of any computer i connect to before i connect to it, or i'm breaking the law.
really? People voluntarily installed a listening device in their homes. That should no way encroach on complete freedom of speech, no matter how tricky.
A corporation has no freedom of speech rights. It's important to remember that a corporation is not considered to the same rights as a person in these cases, nor should they ever be allowed to be.
I just bought a google home (it's only just been released here), and if it either plays me adverts, or other adverts (ab)use it - I will return it to the store without hesitation. This was not sold as an ad-supported service.
To take an extreme position - Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act - they've just performed a distributed denial of service attack on google's servers by using thousands of peoples google devices simultaneously without their permission.
Also - this is a key reason why google need to spend some time on supporting custom hot words for google home. 'OK google' and 'Alexa' are the audio equivalent of IoT devices with a default 'username:admin, password:password' on your network.