Google Now Gets Into Sleep Surveillance With Nest Hub’s Soli

Google’s next internet-connected home device will test whether you rely enough on the company to let it monitor your sleeping pattern. Google’s latest version of Hub, a 7-inch smart screen was unveiled with its key feature including sleep-sensing technology. It has features like fielding questions, displaying pictures and videos, handling tasks via Google assistant and more. It also offers a springboard for Google to get involved in what critics call Sleep Surveillance.

This device will also monitor your sleeping pattern and tell you whether you need to wear a fitness device or other gadgets in bed. Google offers it for free for a year. It relies on what Google calls Soli, a new chip that detects motion using radar. It also monitors breathing depth of a person.

This device will generate an easy to understand weekly sleep-reports. This reports will indicates how frequently you snore and cough, quality of sleep, length of sleep and more.

Google says ‘it honed the technology by studying 15,000 sleeping people over a combined 110,000 nights’.

Those who have trouble sleeping have positive response and they find it appealing. But, again it raises privacy concerns.

It also highlight Google’s obvious intent to extend its tentacles into new areas of people’s lives in its relentless quest to make more money, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer and privacy rights group.

“Google’s goal is to monetize every cell of your body,” Chester said.

Google Nest’s senior product manager Ashton Udall confirmed free sleep sensing feature for a year. This feature will be sold as a subscription service after a year. This feature may be tweaked by Google as company plans to work with Fitbit line of fitness device. 

Google took over Fitbit line of fitness device in January and this purchase has already raised concerns that company could use such devices to enter into personal lives of people.

However, Google says it is emphasizing built in privacy protection in sleep sensing feature. You have to turn this device on and it would have controls that make it clear while sleep tracking is on and easy to delete data from it.

‘All audio will be kept on the device, meaning it won’t be sent to Google’s data centers, although other sleep information will be provided to generate the analysis and reports. None of the information collected through the sleep sensing feature will be used to sell ads’, Udall said.

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