Google wants Assistant to be the soul of its hardware, providing users with a magical artificial intelligence (AI) experience. But the privacy issues that come with AI are still hard for Google to overcome.

Earlier this month, Google released its first “Google-made” phone, the Pixel, which is powered not only by the new Android operating system, Nougat 7.1, but also, more importantly, by Google’s artificial intelligence Assistant, Google Assistant.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Phones and other devices will serve as a vehicle for Google Assistant, as the industry shifts its focus from the phone itself to underlying AI. Google Assistant is similar to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, and Google hopes it will be the “soul” of artificial intelligence in many future smart devices.

Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.

(Google announced several hardware models earlier this month. Photo from Visual China.)

Pichai’s reference to the future of smart devices, Google Home, also showed up at Google’s event. The device, which goes on sale next month, is equipped with voice-controlled artificial intelligence and is the first “hardware” to rival Amazon’s similar Echo. The Echo has been an unexpected success, with 3 million units expected to be sold this year and 10 million in 2017.

Privacy “Invisible Person”

Natasha Lomas, a columnist for Techcrunch, a US technology website, commented that AI’s appetite for users’ personal data is far greater than any previous technology. “Machine learning needs to use information to improve its function, which is data-driven and cannot operate in the dark.”

Pichai added, “We are very excited to build a unique Google for everyone, anywhere.”

Lomas believes that to fulfill Google’s promise to provide users with personalized convenience, such as recommending suitable restaurants and providing transportation advice on the way to and from work, users need to be completely “transparent” by constantly accessing their personal data, preferences and other information. He said:

So the price of “building a unique Google for everyone, anywhere” is, in effect, a complete loss of privacy for everyone at any point in time.

Pichai added that Google Assistant is still in its early days, and that when the product matures, it will be able to provide users with everything they need, anytime, anywhere, and is confident that Google Assistant “will do some amazing things for users in the next 10 years.”

Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.

Lomas said Pichai was essentially saying, “Feel free to give us all your data.”

Allo precedent

In fact, Allo, the Google chat app that integrates With Google Assistant, has come under fire for concerns about user privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international nonprofit digital activist group, said earlier this month that it was pleased with Google’s efforts to create a user-friendly, secure chat app when Allo was first announced. But then it turned out that Google’s actions were actually doing more harm than good.

In its article, the EFF says:

Google’s new chat app offers two modes: a default mode and an incognito mode with end-to-end encryption.

The default mode brings two new features: Google Assistant, a virtual Assistant that responds to queries and searches; And Smart Reply, which analyzes users’ texting habits and suggests actionable responses when they receive messages.

EFF argues that these features in default mode are based on machine learning techniques that require Google servers to constantly read users’ text messages and learn from them. This may be convenient for some users, but the end result is actually harmful for all users.

According to the EFF article, Allo’s incognito mode leads users to use encryption incorrectly. Allo encourages users to use this model when sending private messages, which to the user is understood to be sensitive information that needs to be protected, leading to the “no silver lining” consequence: “Look here, all the valuable sensitive information that needs to be hidden is here.

EFF believes it would be more responsible for a chat app to turn on security and privacy by default, rather than machine learning and AI as default options.

So whether it’s Google Home or Allo, Google is trying to make magic out of AI, but Lomas believes there are deeper issues that could cost Google a lot of money if you look into them.