Several members of a Berlin-based activist group called the
Peng Collective recently made a presentation at the Re:publica tech conference in which they pretended to be Google employees and debuted four new "Google Nest" products: Google Trust (free data insurance), Google Bee (a personal drone to watch over you at all times), Google Hug (a kind of matchmaking service), and Google Bye (an online memorial automatically created for you by Google after you die).
After the presentation, the Peng people told the audience that it was all a parody designed to emphasize Google's "hypocritical" privacy policies. But they asked the audience to tweet about the new products as if they were real, and some people took them up on this. Peng called it an "open-source hoax".
An
accompanying website has since been taken down, after Google indicated they were unhappy with it. [More info:
Forbes.com]
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