Pre-release Google Home Mini goes rogue, starts recording 24/7

The Google Home Mini. It's listening, even sometimes when it's not supposed to. (credit: Google)

The Google Home Mini isn't out yet, but Google is already dealing with an issue related to it.

Artem Russakovskii, the founder of Android Police, tells the harrowing tale of a Google Home Mini gone rogue. Russakovskii's pre-release unit, which he picked up from Google's October 4 event for the tech press, has apparently recorded "thousands of times a day" and attempted to respond to random noises. After swapping the device with Google, Google engineers determined that Russakovskii's Home Mini had a defective touch panel that was registering "phantom" touch events. The Mini has a touch-sensitive surface, and, to issue a command, you can either say "OK Google" or long press on the top. Russakovskii's unit was apparently registering touches at random, so it would randomly start recording audio of his home and storing it on Google's servers.

Google acknowledged the issue on a support page, saying, "The Google Home team is aware of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Mini devices that could cause the touch-control mechanism to behave incorrectly. We immediately rolled out a software update on October 7 to mitigate the issue."