In the spirit of privacy and and invasive tactics to advertise a particular product to consumers, it seems fitting that we gather some opinions on how consumers felt about Burger King’s Google Home trigger this week which caused the speaker to plug the long-time fast food chain’s most iconic burger, the Whopper. For those that missed it, Burger King put out a commercial yesterday that at the very end, used the Ok Google command to trigger Google Home speakers that may have been nearby the TV and could hear the command.
This then prompted Google Home to describe in detail what the Whopper Burger was. The command in question spoken by the person in the commercial was “Ok Google, what is the Whopper Burger?” While this was likely a little annoying and perhaps even upsetting for some consumers, understandably, others may have found it entertaining due to the fact that the response given was from information that was pulled from Wikipedia, which anyone has the potential to edit. This led to numerous responses from Google Home describing the Whopper with hilarious edited details like fake ingredients, at least until Wikipedia locked down the editing to administrators only.
While this may have been little more than a shameless plug to get some recognition for a product, not all users will see it that way. Burger King’s commercial stunt could be seen as an invasion of privacy, though it didn’t take Google long to respond to the situation and disable the commercial from triggering Google Home units, and it seems that Burger King may end up facing legal issues. Despite the quick response from Google though it poses another big issue of whether other companies might follow in Burger King’s footsteps, and it surely leaves some customers wondering what Google might to do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future as Google Home is meant to be a personal product, and some consumers who own them may feel that it should be off limits when it comes to and advertisements, let alone ones that they didn’t initiate some sort of action or function that led to receiving them. In this particular case, Burger King took advantage of the technology knowing that they would likely be able to trigger people’s devices. The question is whether or not it bothered you, and if it did whether or not it bothered beyond a point where you would simply shrug it off and forget about it. How did you feel about the whole ordeal?