Sure it would be useful. Sell the assistant as a locally-installed app that guarantees personal data never leaves the LAN and will sell.
> sure they'll collect your info
Only if you let them. Demand better behavior from their software and business practices.
> Totalitarian Surveillance or Data Breach Concerns
What you seem to be missing is that the concern isn't about today's level of surveillance or today's data breach risk. Data generally persists indefinitely once it makes its way into a database or logfile.
To make a claim that these are low risk requires that at no time in the future will surveillance risk increase or data breaches become more common, ... or that the company will run into financial trouble and need to sell your data, ... or that a breach will be forced by a government (not necessarily your's or Google's), ... or that your data will be aggregated into other databases, increasing the "predictive" power and attack surface, ... or any of the other unknown ways your data could be used in the future.
Humans are already known to be terrible at assessing risk, especially when there is a very large separation between the cause and effect. Smoking today giving you cancer many years later is a traditional example. We already know data breaches happen, well meaning employees make mistakes or succumb to corruption, and external powers such as governments or organized crime occasionally take away your agency. Do you really want to claim that none of these risks will ever happen? Because that's the actual wager you're making when when you use Google's products.
Sure it would be useful. Sell the assistant as a locally-installed app that guarantees personal data never leaves the LAN and will sell.
> sure they'll collect your info
Only if you let them. Demand better behavior from their software and business practices.
> Totalitarian Surveillance or Data Breach Concerns
What you seem to be missing is that the concern isn't about today's level of surveillance or today's data breach risk. Data generally persists indefinitely once it makes its way into a database or logfile.
To make a claim that these are low risk requires that at no time in the future will surveillance risk increase or data breaches become more common, ... or that the company will run into financial trouble and need to sell your data, ... or that a breach will be forced by a government (not necessarily your's or Google's), ... or that your data will be aggregated into other databases, increasing the "predictive" power and attack surface, ... or any of the other unknown ways your data could be used in the future.
Humans are already known to be terrible at assessing risk, especially when there is a very large separation between the cause and effect. Smoking today giving you cancer many years later is a traditional example. We already know data breaches happen, well meaning employees make mistakes or succumb to corruption, and external powers such as governments or organized crime occasionally take away your agency. Do you really want to claim that none of these risks will ever happen? Because that's the actual wager you're making when when you use Google's products.