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Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

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Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#41

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

I mean. Of course they are. Do you expect to be able to do any meaningful level of training on data that hasn't been properly labeled? At some point, a human has to go in and correct the software when the software gets it wrong. If you want services that do what Google Home does, you have to have this.

Even with that, I'm sure that the engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more then once, or where some one has to manually change or correct what the software thought was the request.

This is only creepy if you don't understand how the software works.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#42

Post by Maximus9000 »

gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Pay beta testers who know what they're signing up for? Train the software with previously human transcribed audio (like TV/audiobooks/etc)

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#43

Post by Ensorceled »

duxup wrote: post #2

This 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'm not sure why it's unreasonable for customers to have assumed this is like every other product: they developed it with employees and voluteers before shipping.

After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#44

Post by dalbasal »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #24
chance_state wrote: post #4

"What Orwell failed to predict is that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching."

Yes, Orwell was a very shallow thinker.

People often mistake plain and clear for shallow. I consider him an intellectual (and moral) giant.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#45

Post by 50656E6973 »

gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Use test subjects who sign up explicitly and specifically for this purpose, rather than burying it in a massive TOS written in legalese that can change at any time and is applied indiscriminately to all customers

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#46

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

thrwer3434312 wrote: post #31
gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

They can't. They need to transcribe the data.

^This. I'm sure they're optimizing to only transcribe data they are pretty confident they got wrong (multiple requests; use has to go in and correct), but if you want software to do what the Google Home software does, you have to do this.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#47

Post by groovybits »

Assuming $0.3/audio clip and base wage of $10/hr, that equates to 33.3 audio clips/hr = 266.4 audio clips/day that are being monitored by any one 'language expert'.

However, Google does not specify how long a 'conversation' is. How many sentences make up a conversation? When is the cutoff point?

Google also says '1 in 500' conversations are monitored. That means for any one 'language expert', there are approx. 133,200 conversations/day that have a chance of being monitored.

So basically, you have a 0.2% chance that your conversation is being picked up by any particular 'language expert' per day.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#48

Post by kypro »

gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Explicit op-ins?

"Google would like to use the last 15 minutes of voice data to improve Google Home. This may contain sensitive information. Do you approve?"

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#49

Post by hammock »

electrograv wrote: post #15

So 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 p…

You paraphrased it in a different way and that might be why you're confused.

Google says "the excerpts are not linked to personally identifiable information." To me that means the metadata is stripped, not that they strip anything out of the audio.

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