Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Google’s new Nest Hub Max is a smart display unit that comes equipped with a 6.5-megapixel facial recognition camera that identifies you and monitors all your actions – inside your own home.

And the Orwellian icing on the cake is that it is not equipped with a physical shutter to forcibly prevent it from monitoring what’s happening in your home.

It’s the first smart home product from Google to include a camera so you can make video calls. It looks like a tablet propped up on its side, and it works similarly to smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo. … The Nest Hub Max is essentially a smart speaker that lets you control connected smart home devices, and comes with a display and camera. It’s the first smart home product from Google to include a camera so you can make video calls. It looks like a tablet propped up on its side, and it works similarly to smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo. … The Nest Hub Max is essentially a smart speaker that lets you control connected smart home devices, and comes with a display and camera. It’s not too dissimilar from the Google Home Hub, which Google just rebranded as Nest Hub. The new device has a 10-inch HD screen. It looks like a tablet in landscape orientation that’s propped up on a base. The base contains a speaker. At the top of the device are a camera and microphones. –The Daily Dot

The device allows you to check in on what’s happening in your home when you’re out, and because of its facial recognition capabilities, will detect when you enter the room and provide personalized information to you, such as your day’s appointments, the weather forecast, and so on, reported Natural News. The camera also enables two-way video calls over Google Duo and comes loaded with the Google Assistant (which has been the focus of a huge number of privacy issues). While all these functions might sound super convenient and fun, the privacy issues raised by the camera and audio functionality cannot be overlooked.

There are concerns about Google’s face recognition. The company has struggled to maintain a good reputation. They have proven to be biased toward Communism and authoritarian ideals, big government control over the population, and have even censored those who reject the force and violence inherent in those ideas. Today the face features are only accessible by Google, but what happens when it begins letting other apps and services access your face and you are one of those anti-government dissenters?

Clearly, there are real reasons to be concerned about Google’s latest tech offering, and those who wish to protect their online privacy might do better to steer well clear of it.