The number of people in this thread who believe that this is ok because, 1) it's obviously the only way Google could train their voice system and thus 2) people clearly knew what they were getting into, is horrifying.
Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
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Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#62Home, 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…
"They all do" ... my understanding is that this expressly does not happen with HomePod conversations.
As far as I am aware, Siri's audio retention policy is up to two years.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#63From 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?"
Everyone would just decline because there's no incentive to agree, and their product would die. Plus it would annoy users and cause stress.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#64The one thing about these stories that keep coming out about the home assistants... they kind of create the impression that this is an issue specific to home speakers, and you can avoid it, by simply not buying them. That's misleading. Any voice command you use to operate any internet connected tech gadget, from phones to smart TV's, is potentially stored and flagged for human review. You really have to avoid using v…
And not to be anywhere near anyone else's listening devices. Isn't there a law in some US states that there needs to be consent before recording someone? How does this fit in and who would be held responsible, the owner of the listening device or the company behind it?
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Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#65I 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 on…
>This is only creepy if you don't understand how the software works.
No, its only creepy if you're not sure whether or not conversations had in the "privacy" of your own home are being listened to by a faceless person
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are a lot of things that Google could have done better in this situation without meaningfully impacting their software's quality.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#67I very much believe the only reason smartphones aren't listening to us and recording us constantly is due to battery purposes. When you plug something in, yeah, I have no trouble believing they're recording everything and storing it somewhere.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#68Duh! Of course they are listening; how else would they train such agent ? It's not like you can come up with a random NN that is suddenly sentient.
They could use data that doesn't come from their customers, many of whom are not aware that they're training Google's models…
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#69From 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.
Not true. Apple has demonstrated how to do it and has published a paper on the topic.
A. Bhowmick et al. Protection Against Reconstruction and Its Application in Private Federated Learning, 2018.
Don’t just dismissively say “oh that’s different and doesn’t apply” until you read it and understand the range of problems Apple is tackling with this and similar approaches. A lot can be done when the organization makes privacy a priority.
Let’s not forget I am replying to a person who has chosen to use a throwaway account for this topic. Why did they do that? Hmmm.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's roughly the same level of exposure you run into literally every minute you're out in public anyway - all those phones around you have microphones, and more and more, they're always listening in exactly the same fashion. This is how always-on "Hey Siri" or "Okay Google" works. Which isn't to say it isn't frustrating, just that your frustration at your friend is misplaced - they're not exposing you to anyt…
Scary though isn't it ? With increasing moves in these companies to govern human thought, I can imagine a time when it'll be extremely difficult to have any independent thought of your own. It's already this way in the academia/media, where anything outside the norm is considered 'blasphemy'.
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