I think this is the last straw for me. I have already tinkered with the idea and built enough for POC. But I am going to have to replace all my google home and amazon stuff with home built systems that I control both the hardware (to a extent) and the software.
Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
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Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#12This falls into the category of: I bugged my house... NOW MY HOUSE IS BUGGED! Not to dismiss the value of the news here, it is important for folks to know, but the overall situation is both concerning, and amusing.
Most people assume that the system is entirely automated, and that their commands will be processed by mere computers, not listened to by actual people who might even be their own neighbours.
I fear that most people ... don't care, or don't assume the system is automated.
And they do it anyway.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#13My biggest frustration is going to a friends house which is blanketed with Echo/Google coverage and realizing that all my words could be used against me at a later time.
How does one approach this situation?
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#14Intersect certain church bell sounds with Google assistant buyers in a small village and you have the individual.
EDIT: thinking about it, a database of temporal-geographical background sounds would be nice to have
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#15So Google’s response is (paraphrased as fairly as I can while removing the sugar-coating):
’Yes, we hire people to listen in to and transcribe some conversations from the private homes of our customers (so as improve our speech recognition engines); but the recordings aren’t linked to personally identifiable information.’
Even assuming they have only the purest intentions here, I still don’t understand how they can possibly guarantee that these recorded conversations are not linked to personally identifiable information!
For example, what’s to stop me from saying “Hey Google, I am and my most embarrassing and private secret is ”?
One might argue that they could detect this in the recognized text and omit those samples, but presumably the whole purpose of hiring people to create transcripts is because the existing speech-to-text engine isn’t perfect, and they need more training data.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#16Home, Siri, Alexa, M, they all do. I have friends that work on this field transcribing the audio, and measuring its accuracy. Sometimes it's multiple layers of contractors: An employee hands the task to a contractor, another contractor verifies the speech to text, and they're all managed by a contractor.
Search for languages like Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, etc on LinkedIn and you'll find the jobs posts https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?keywords=portuguese&lo...
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#17It's no coincidence that companies like Amazon market their Echos as "stocking stuffers" for the holiday season. I've wondered how Google Home and these "smart home" devices were always able to be priced as low as they are. Goes to show that paying for the product doesn't exempt you from still being part of the product.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#18My biggest frustration is going to a friends house which is blanketed with Echo/Google coverage and realizing that all my words could be used against me at a later time. How does one approach this situation?
Tell the truth or remain silent. Try not to incriminate yourself.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#19The biggest issue IMHO is how the average consumer has been deceived into the belief that current AI is pure AI, when in reality a lot of humans are looking at your pictures, listening to your recordings, crawling through your inbox and analyzing your browsing/purchasing/streaming history, right now: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/trained_a_neural_net.png
Engineering Tip #2 -> if you pay someone else to do it, you can technically say you did it in the cloud
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#20This falls into the category of: I bugged my house... NOW MY HOUSE IS BUGGED! Not to dismiss the value of the news here, it is important for folks to know, but the overall situation is both concerning, and amusing.
I mean, I would assume that humans are used to improve the speech recognition capabilities of voice assistants. Accents alone are a big challenge to voice recognition, not to mention regional dialects, and the more complex languages.
People listening to what is said to a voice assistant after the prompt doesn't really alarm me. What would be alarming is if the voice assistant was secretly recording normal conversations.