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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

#71

Post by kahnjw »

arien wrote: post #60
bastawhiz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already consented by agreeing to the terms of service. If someone else is talking to their smart device while you're talking, it's ostensibly their responsibility. There's no reasonable laws that prevent you from being overheard in the back of a recorded phone conversation

Not in the case of the device being someone else's. I don't have any Google or Amazon smart listeners, so I never accepted them. Yet if my voice is in any of these recordings, well...

How do you square that with a security cameras? Do you need to consent every time you enter a space secured by them?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#72

Post by mcv »

rwc wrote: post #27
inerte wrote: post #16

Home, 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.

I'm not familiar with HomePod, but if I ever get an Alexa/Siri kind of assistant, it will be one that analyses my voice locally rather than sending it to the cloud.

Ah, who am I kidding? I just bought a new Android phone, which probably does exactly the same thing. Time to install LineageOS on it, I guess.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#74

Post by tuxxy »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #41

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 on…

I feel like if you have to say, "It's only creepy if you don't know how the software worries" you're on the wrong side here.

Regardless of how the software works, it's still incredibly creepy.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#75

Post by microtonal »

inerte wrote: post #54
rwc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They all do" ... my understanding is that this expressly does not happen with HomePod conversations.

So I meant "they" in the sense of the companies, not necessarily the home devices. Sorry about the confusion. I know 100% that it happens with Siri. If Apple is excluding HomePod conversations from Siri's dataset, that I don't know.

Do you have a source for human annotation of Siri recordings? Do they use subcontractors like Google?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#76

Post by anbop »

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…

“I rue the day I married you, Steven Robert Parker, you HIV-infected cheating scumbag! I wish I had never lied to the FBI about those classified documents you stole!”

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#77

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

inetknght wrote: post #56
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #41

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 on…

> I'm sure that the engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more then once As a user, I expect to see feedback declaring that it's having trouble and specifically requesting permission to send my unparseable requests to some review queue. I expect to see feedback indicating what could resolve the issue: was it something I said? was there too much noise in the background? was there a software fault and a fix…

>The fact that I do not get any feedback whatsoever when things go wrong leads me to have no faith that the problem will be resolved in any satisfactory manner. When combined with a complete lack of consumer/business interaction options in general (w.r.t. Google), it leads to some very dissatisfied consumers.

I guess you can ask for your money back? Lets stay grounded in reality here, Google is paying money on your behalf to improve your experience. They could, and from a financial perspective maybe should try getting you to annotate your own data. But all that annotated data gets pooled and used to improve the models. I don't think their goal here is to give you faith they are resolving your issue. The algorithm is going to get some things wrong. Its a matter of improving the overall accuracy and precision in the algorithm.

>You think engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more than once? How would engineers have access to that data in the first place if it's supposed to be anonymous and private?

100% they have to be. Its too costly and time intensive to slog through all the data. Probably* they have a flag that goes off on a voice request when something is either not intelligibly interpreted so many times in a row. Or if a use has to go manually do something after repeatedly making a request. This flags the interaction for manual review. Then it processes through some algorithm to strip it of identifying data. Then it gets put in front of a warm body for review.

Trust me that the company wants to avoid putting things in front of warm bodies as much as possible. Its expensive.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#78

Post by notTyler »

arien wrote: post #36
SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #28

The 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?

Yeah, this was a big issue about a decade ago when police officers could sue someone for recording said officers doing something illegal in Massachusetts.

So they redacted that law then had to fast track an updated version of it a few years later when someone got arrested for taking upskirt photos and then it wasn't illegal. My cousin was an aide to a state lawmaker and had to explain to his boss what it meant at the time.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#79

Post by falcolas »

asciident wrote: post #63
kypro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that our problem? If a product relies on dark pattern acceptance of being "spied upon" to succeed, why should we want it to succeed?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#80

Post by snarf21 »

r00fus wrote: post #13

My 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?

Your only recourse is to stop going to that friends house. Also, remember you and others still have a internet connected microphone in your pocket at all times. A zero day means you could be owned at any time.
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