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Google Home

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Re: Google Home

#441

Post by barrkel »

tomg wrote: post #436
mbrock wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Free Software Foundation, in its texts, often uses the phrase "the free world" to mean the realm of computing without proprietary restrictions, surveillance, etc. Approximately since Snowden, I've become more and more convinced about both the fragility and the value of this free world. And today, I basically see the tech giants as colossal enemies. Career-wise, henceforth I will avoid proprietary systems and dedi…

> And today, I basically see the tech giants as colossal enemies. I think it's important to note that in-house voice recognition is simply the Nth iteration of a general trend away from privacy that has been going on for many many years. Eg: Our emails are scraped, and use to target ads. I see ads for specific things that I've only mentioned as a 'reminder email' from myself, to myself. SMS can be read as well, at le…

Laws are usually written as a reaction to excess. But excess is measured as a distance between two points, and both are able to move: actions can be more extreme, and our judgements can be more or less harsh.

I think things could change quite dramatically if there was a moral panic around it. A few more scandals - something personal that the voting public can really relate to, rather than something vague and distant and somewhat comforting to some people, like mass surveillance.

Re: Google Home

#442

Post by cavilatrest »

mbrock wrote: post #419
digi_owl wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole UX thing is overrated. People will like what they are accustomed to, and dislike what they are not accustomed to. Just look at all the flak Facebook gets when they move things around.

Or look at medical secretaries and their opinions about the new "user friendly" interfaces that replaced the keyboard driven programs of previous generations.

Right but there's a level of lock-in and lack of change in enterprise environments that doesn't exist in consumer tech.

Re: Google Home

#443

Post by DKnoll3 »

angryasian wrote: post #87
vox_mollis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large difference between being a PRISM partner( broad hoovering of all data )and a party to a narrowly-scoped warrant or subpoena, as Amazon would be. Meyer would do well to cite the specific statute that makes noncompliance into a charge of treason. Otherwise she's clearly lying to spin the actions of Yahoo for PR points.

Well we can go through a back and forth on this but we'll never really know the true extent of PRISM as whats been speculated is they have a direct connection to ISP's so the reality is that they probably know more than what even an individual company knows. Both Google and Apple have said the same, any access requires court order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) Google: "Google cares deepl…

Google is a very low-profile, high-importance contractor for the US Federal government, specifically for the intelligence agencies. It's kind of startling how little even HN readers know about this.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

I find it very difficult to believe that US Federal Contracts have not swayed their levels of cooperation at the highest level.

Re: Google Home

#444

Post by DKnoll3 »

codingdave wrote: post #64
vox_mollis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not. The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this. Edit: Downvoters, please educate me on where I am wrong. Thanks.

Odds are that you already have a phone near you, with a microphone. If they want to record you, they don't need a new device to do so.

Sure, so let's give them as many sources, streams, and means of accessing our lives as they want!

Re: Google Home

#445

Post by scalio »

mbrock wrote: post #407
scalio wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a neat solution is home-serving. A little box with big storage which acts as a hub for your family's digital life. It relays all your devices, gathers all info they're spitting out, and works on it. Results are fed back to the UIs. When you're out and about, your devices tunnel home automatically, knowing the endpoint is trustworthy (which is more than can be said about traditional VPNs). All your photos, twe…

Search is cool, but Google-style universal search might be a bit overrated. Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic. I mean, a competent librarian has a kind of expertise that Google's algorithms don't, so that's one situation to explore for a post-Google idea of finding information (of cou…

Yes, google certainly isn't the best we can do in terms of finding stuff, but I think the sheer amount of data they're gathering enables the algorithms to appear more intelligent than they really are by processing more instead of better (as you say, there is little to no curation going on).

This is one of the main reasons I think home serving is a great idea. It enables people with some interest in one another to connect directly, one-to-one, instead of running around in some third party's server. This opens possibilities for exchange and networking on a very personal basis that we don't have today mostly because of privacy concerns (virtual neighbourhoods and the like).

Re: Google Home

#446

Post by frik »

artpar wrote: post #412
frik wrote: post #199

Google, thanks for shutting down Freebase.com on 2 May 2016. By taking it offline, and using it (Knowledge Graph) for Google Home you effectively locked out all competitors. WikiData is a far cry and a fraction of the size of what was Freebase. Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from ma…

Freebase data dump is available for download for free. And so is Wikipedia and Dbpedia. And so i common crawl and webdatacommons dumps What are you doing with that ? - https://developers.google.com/freebase/#freebase-rdf-dumps - http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ - http://webdatacommons.org/ - https://dumps.wikimedia.org/

How useful is an aging Freebase dump from last year? How useful is it next year? Old outdated data isn't that useful? There is no alternative to Freebase, and oth companies bought companies to have access to an alternative. Microsoft bought Powerset company for Bing, IBM bought Wekko company for Watson, Googe closed down Freebase to use it in-house. And everone else is very "happy" about Google.

Re: Google Home

#447

Post by dguaraglia »

dagss wrote: post #430
ryandrake wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can choose not to use a particular product. But we cannot choose not to use all the products everyone else is using, because that would make us lonely, antisocial hermits without the slightest chance of ever finding work, friends or lovers. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. etc. etc., you name it. Yet, somehow I am employed, have friends and hobbies, and am happily married. How could that have possib…

You happened to be born before those tools were invented. Question at hand is how life will be for those growing up now.

I guess you have a point. I, too, grew up before all these things were "the standard" (heck, I didn't have internet at home until I was 22 for crying out loud) so even though it is annoying when they aren't there, I can totally picture a life without them.

Re: Google Home

#448

Post by gvurrdon »

dredmorbius wrote: post #326
api wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never EVER under any circumstances would I put a closed-source cloud-connected always-on microphone in my house. Google's entire business model and value as a company revolves around their ability to maximize the accuracy of their consumer profiles. They have no incentive to do anything other than maximally invade privacy. A device like this from them is even creepier than the Amazon Echo. While it's not released yet…

To the advantage of society, Google's value also lies in not alienating people to the point that they shun its products and services . Google cannot sell advertising based on my eyeballs if I won't use Google Search, block ads, avoid Google Maps, and download video via yt-download vs. watching it on the far-less-convenient YouTube website or application. Google have lost me to search, and several other products, for…

I've switched to DuckDuckGo and "paused" various activities within my Google account settings. Still, I can't help wondering if records I've deleted there are simply my copies and they have their own backups stashed somewhere.

Re: Google Home

#449

Post by api »

gvurrdon wrote: post #448
dredmorbius wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the advantage of society, Google's value also lies in not alienating people to the point that they shun its products and services . Google cannot sell advertising based on my eyeballs if I won't use Google Search, block ads, avoid Google Maps, and download video via yt-download vs. watching it on the far-less-convenient YouTube website or application. Google have lost me to search, and several other products, for…

I've switched to DuckDuckGo and "paused" various activities within my Google account settings. Still, I can't help wondering if records I've deleted there are simply my copies and they have their own backups stashed somewhere.

Google is known to never delete anything, not even intermediate revisions.

Re: Google Home

#450

Post by dredmorbius »

pacala wrote: post #409
dredmorbius wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And laser mics can be aimed against glass. Both have to be specifically placed, however. Common devices with location tracking and audio monitoring capabilities already exist. They can be targeted for monitoring, and to the best of my knowledge, are . Some are actively monitoring activity on an ongoing basis -- e.g., someone's voice-enabled TV sets. I really can't even keep up with all this crap any more. All of whic…

> All of which is moot to the original point: that people can choose whether or not this equipment is in their environment or not. Effectively they cannot. Absolutely. Just pointing out that we're on the path to adding always on cloud connected far field microphones in every other house in the country. Good luck "choosing" to not be listened to. The largest danger is self-censorship. "What is the risk somebody is lis…

I believe you're now arguing my initial point for me.

Thank you.

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