121–130 of 135 posts
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Asking for weather is an API issue, it totally does not require uploading your voice.
It requires uploading where you are. And it requires uploading the voice for processing if you want it to distinguish "what's the weather today" from "tonight", "tomorrow", "this weekend at ", or "back at home".
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I built an off-line voice recognition system 10 years ago using Microsoft Speech API and I guarantee you it worked quite well. There's nothing in base voice recognition that would require uploading everything to the cloud. You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model.
> You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model. I guess that's what kills it as practical in the real world.
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Not if you don't use Android.
Yes if you use Android, and in particular yes if you've given an app camera access. Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.
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Yes if you use Android, and in particular yes if you've given an app camera access. Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.
I said if you _dont_ use android
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I think you over-estimate the public's sensitivity to the risk model. I know plenty of people (myself included) who know how it works and cheerfully embrace it, because the benefits outweigh the risks.
I know many technical people who understand the technology side of things, but they don't fully understand the political and societal implications. That may not be true in your case, and you may have some new arguments that I haven't heard, but I've never found a convincing argument for being careless about privacy, and I've been following and debating the issue fairly closely for about 15 years. It's a very complex…
I'm personally very much in the "I don't mind if they have my data if it helps me find products that I like" camp. More specifically: I want the capabilities these technologies afford me, and if the requirement to use them is I fork over my data, sign me up. Because there isn't an alternative out there that works as well that isn't collecting a lot of data to power that functionality.
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It requires uploading where you are. And it requires uploading the voice for processing if you want it to distinguish "what's the weather today" from "tonight", "tomorrow", "this weekend at ", or "back at home".
In theory, voice processing could be done locally, and then you'd only have to upload coordinates and/or place name, just as every non-voice weather app.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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Always on cameras, always on mics, that's a new low even for Google. Technically they are not yet uploading everything into the cloud, but who in his right mind is trusting Google on privacy anymore? From Google Maps the other day "New! share your location with your friends for an hour". Oh, by the way, give Google Maps permission to always track your location, forever. Wtf. Camera and microphone on the mobile phone…
>Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them. Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment and remind you that, should Google want to, they could just turn on your microphone and camera without letting you know. Would they? Probably not, but they certainly could, and unless you're in the habit of regularly checking your network traffic, you wouldn't know.
Like most in this thread, I am not _actively_ paranoid about this, but a constant low-grade paranoid.
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In theory, voice processing could be done locally, and then you'd only have to upload coordinates and/or place name, just as every non-voice weather app.
You could easily anonymize the location up to, for example, a 50x50 miles rectangle. Or you could state in your EULA "we don't keep the location your device sends to our servers for more than 30 minutes." > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-...
This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.
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> You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model. I guess that's what kills it as practical in the real world.
Laziness is competitive advantage. There are costs to it though - in this case, we pay for it with our data. Small bits of our souls, if you will.
For everyone else though, there are some neat families of features in all the major tech stacks.
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Yes, but there are two problems with this particular company: 1. they have grown this mentality where they gather any data they can get their hands on - apologize only when/if caught red handed. (remember google street car password gathering?). 2. the more you use their services the more dependent you become. but google have shown zero care for individual consumers. (who do you call if gmail craps out on you?)
> remember google street car password gathering? What? Wasn't that "SSID gathering", as in "the name you give your WiFi network, which is then visible to anyone that passes by"? How could a streetview car gather passwords?