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Google Home Ends A Domestic Dispute By Calling The Police (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: According to ABC News, officers were called to a home outside Albuquerque, New Mexico this week when a Google Home called 911 and the operator heard a confrontation in the background. Police say that Eduardo Barros was house-sitting at the residence with his girlfriend and their daughter. Barros allegedly pulled a gun on his girlfriend when they got into an argument and asked her: "Did you call the sheriffs?" Google Home apparently heard "call the sheriffs," and proceeded to call the sheriffs. A SWAT team arrived at the home and after negotiating for hours, they were able to take Barros into custody... "The unexpected use of this new technology to contact emergency services has possibly helped save a life," Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales III said in a statement.
"It's easy to imagine police getting tired of being called to citizen's homes every time they watch the latest episode of Law and Order," quips Gizmodo. But they also call the incident "a clear reminder that smart home devices are always listening."

11 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Won't be long now by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Coming soon, a law that mandates that all homes be equipped with one of these devices as well as prison sentences for those who attempt to disable them. For the sake of the children, of course. "You are the dead!"

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    1. Re:Won't be long now by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, George Orwell probably deserves "first post" honors.

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      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:Won't be long now by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then, coming a little later -- perhaps 20 minutes into the future -- we'll have a Max Headroom situation...

      In the future, an oligarchy of television networks rules the world. Even the government functions primarily as a puppet of the network executives, serving mainly to pass laws — such as banning "off" switches on televisions — that protect and consolidate the networks' power.

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      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    3. Re: Won't be long now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      im impressed, the 911 operator actually did their job and did not hang up because of their low hourly wage.

      Too bad. In the long-run big picture, it may be a good thing to have some natural selection against women who are attracted to assholes. Lots of women falsely think being aggressive and/or violent is "manly". It would better our species. Just like most (nearly all?) other mammals, most mating is based on females' choices, it is assumed the male wants to mate.

      Well, anyway she sure knows how to pick 'em! Maybe he was a jock or had a nice fat bank account. I wonder, how many kindhearted gentlemen did she say "let's just be friends" to?

      BTW the Slashdot crowd is genearlly rather spiteful and when you make a point they don't like they quickly try to make things personal. So I'll say up-front I'm in a happy relationship with a beautiful woman and I treat her well. So sorry if that makes it harder to launch an ad hominem - maybe you can try to tell me why you disagree with me (like an adult) instead?

    4. Re: Won't be long now by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Claims to treat women well and yet reduces the mating habits of humans to prehistoric times to make a point... You sure there's not more to the picture than raw strength? It's not like all women like all the same things,

      Whether all women do or not is irrelevant. It's not about you; not everything is. Statistics show which men get to father the most children, and that's generally not the mild men. That men on average are larger than women is also evidence in itself. If there were no advantage for men to be bigger and stronger than their rival men, they wouldn't be. Evolution works relatively fast; a few dozen generations should show a markedly shift from bigger and stronger men if it didn't have an advantage, due to disadvantages like requiring more food. And if they have an advantage, it follows that women select for that advantage to increase the chances of their male children. The women who don't will have fewer successful male offspring.

      Women like to think they're in control, but are as much slaves to the biological imperative as men are. There's no "going beyond evolutionary programming", because evolution selects against that.

  2. I call bullshit by technomom · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google Home cannot yet make phone calls. I'd like to see some proof that this was a Google Home at work. Isn't anyone at all skeptical anymore about news stories?

  3. Re: good thing that the GOP will not give out well by DeathElk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's the problem with welfare for poor folks? As long as there's an obligation for self betterment with the view to getting off welfare i.e. education, internship, community service, I don't see the problem.

    Corporate welfare on the other hand, I have a big problem with that. It has been demonstrated time and time again that corporate leaders use tax breaks to pad their own packages rather than improve employment prospects. Trickle down simply does not work and greed is the main factor.

  4. Re: good thing that the GOP will not give out wel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So you support corporations using the poor as easy position filling? That's what happens when you attach it to things like 'showing self improvement'. You get corporations taking part in incentive programs to 'create jobs'. The jobs in question are bottom of the barrel, violate labor laws (that the ignorant and poor cannot fight), and generally treat people like shit.

    It then becomes a punishment to get off of welfare. We need to sever the tie between corporations, healthcare, and indeed even just surviving. Work needs to provide enough of a benefit that the government isn't needed. What often happens is these people get off welfare and have less money than they did before leaving it. Why bust your ass for pennies when the government takes better care of you?

    Nobody has an answer to that because they're too busy being faux-moral jerkoffs. They believe everyone should suffer to justify their existence, or that some nebulous idea of 'personal responsibility' is the only way to go forward. Those values are proven to fail when challenged, because it becomes an excuse to mistreat people.

  5. Re: good thing that the GOP will not give out well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fucking NSA agent diverting the conversation to partisan politics so the serfs are distracted from the original topic!

  6. Re:Better not watch tv near that piece of shit. by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So you would have them process/blacklist every possible audio track from every show, movie, and radio broadcast ever created?

    ...yes?

    It's not an intractable problem; merely an issue of scale, and the folks producing these systems are excellent at solving scaling issues. After all, the process has already begun with music.

    As one possible solution, start with the libraries from Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Those libraries are already digitized and delivered in high-quality streams. As broadcast streams are produced, take a feed from each content-producing station, and process that. Note that since these streams can be processed faster than they're viewed, the backlog can be eventually caught up.

    On the blacklist side, false positives can be reduced by listening to identify what media is being played. If you're watching Law and Order, for example, the device (or more appropriately, the cloud system behind it) can recognize the episode, and know to ignore the remaining dialog. That in turn increases the confidence of matches that aren't part of the episode's audio track. Conversely, when you change the station, the device can detect the deviation from the soundtrack, and lower that confidence input.

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    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  7. Re:Woman goes nuts threatens daughter by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Guy intervenes, gets hurt, ,..."

    and then breaks the law by using force other than in self-defence, and then breaks another law by pulling a gun when his life is not in immediate danger.

    No matter how much you might dislike it, a gun is literally the last resort and you don't pull it unless you fully intend to shoot to kill. If you pull it and don't shoot, it's because of a major change in the situation, but - like an airbag going off - is something that should automatically involve the police if things have got this far.

    Either way, you want the police coming at that point. And your correct response would not have been to pull the gun unless you genuinely thought that you needed to use it as a lethal weapon (rather than just showing it off to shut people up), or - if you didn't intend to use it - using reasonable force to restrain - AND - having called the police.

    Responsibility comes with it the ability to know the legal limits. Even "fighting back" is a grey area unless the safety of yourself or others is in question if you don't. And there you want police to come too.

    Sorry, in this case, penis means "I'm going to pull out a weapon when it's unjustified and threaten people with it". The exact thing that the rest of the world is always pointing at when the US doesn't punish its own police force for doing that. Let alone a private citizen.

    Much scarier than that people tolerate devices listening all the time is that they can call emergency services just by hearing certain phrases. Much scarier than that is idiots pulling guns because of a domestic. Much scarier than that is idiots like that being able to source and carry guns, legally.

    If you had restraint, nothing would have been able to get to that kind of position anyway.