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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

#111

Post by cj »

I've long been curious how GDPR should be applied to Google Home, Alexa, etc.

These devices record and upload voice recordings to the cloud (with a percentage apparently shared with Google contractors to process). The audio clips can be recordings of conversations of people who have not consented to being recorded. And I can't imagine it's possible for Amazon or Google to reasonably comply with Art. 15 or 17 (right of access by data subject, and right to erasure).

Is there something I'm overlooking? Or is this just a known risk that Amazon/Google accept in providing the service?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#112

Post by duck »

noego wrote: post #101
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 wonder how people felt about handing all their personal photos over to a stranger just so they can get developed and printed, back in the 1990s. By today's standards, that would be incredibly creepy. But everyone did it because... having photos is pretty awesome. It would be nice if companies like Google made it very clear that specific forms of user-data can/will be human reviewed for development/operational purpo…

Photo labs have been around way before the 90's and lots of people still use them.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#113

Post by close04 »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #77
inetknght wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> Lets stay grounded in reality here, Google is paying money on your behalf to improve your experience.

Lets stay grounded in reality here, Google is not doing this for me or on my behalf. Google just invests a bit to take a bunch of very valuable user data and then monetizes it for far more than it took to obtain it. This relies on the fact that most users are unaware of how valuable their data is.

As a business model there's nothing illegal about this. But in any other sense it's no different from tricking an uneducated individual into selling their kidney for $2000 just so you can resell it for $20.000 and pretend you're doing them a favor by giving them money.

And as long as the vast majority of customers are in the dark regarding the value of their data and what they're actually trading when using such a system then yes, this is Google (and not only) abusing ignorance to line their pockets.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#114

Post by rev12 »

I think a lot of people here are under the assumption that voice commands, on any device, have the potential to be human reviewed. I am not sure whether or not the general public has that same assumption.

That being said, my biggest concern is the fact that many of these device don't have a hardware microphone kill switch. I feel better when I know I can control when a device is listening in. I've read reports that some Alexa devices have them, but I don't own any so I am unable to verify that.

I want all of my devices with microphones to hardware based kill switch for the mic; that's my phone, laptop, tablet, everything.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#115

Post by arien »

tinus_hn wrote: post #82
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…

So without connecting this phrase to a person or other phrases, what information leaks? That the person exists?

In terms of GDPR:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#116

Post by natch »

energybar wrote: post #107
natch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

Is this why Siri has worse performance compared to others?

Hah! Good one. I hope not. I think the Siri people at Apple have just gotten lazy. Maybe they are too impressed with themselves and focusing on BS things like sports scores. I hope they get more ambitious soon.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#117

Post by ovi256 »

gringoDan wrote: post #95

I think the responses to this can be broken down into a 2x2 matrix: level of concern vs. understanding of technology. 1) Don't understand ML; not concerned - "I have nothing to hide." 2) Don't understand ML; concerned - "I bought this device and now people are spying on me!" 3) Understand ML; not concerned - "Of course, Google needs to label its training data." 4) Understand ML; concerned - "How can we train models/c…

This classification is very useful to discuss this issue.

The difference between 3 and 4, noble as it is, can be caused by feasability concerns that push people into 3, not just ignorance of the privacy impact. Human labelling of training data sets is a big thing in supervised learning. Methods that dispense with this would be valuable for purely economic reasons beyond privacy - the cost of human labelling of data samples. Yet we don't have them!

Techniques like federated learning or differential privacy can train models on opaque (encrypted or unavailable) data. This is nice, but they assume too much: that the data is already validated and analyzed. In real life modelling problems, one starts with an exploratory data analysis, the first step being looking at data samples. Opaque encrypted datasets also stop ML engineers from doing error analysis (look at your errors to better target model/dataset improvements) which is an even bigger issue, IMO, as error analysis is crucial when iterating on a model.

Even for an already productivized model, one has to do maintenance work like checking for concept drift, which I can't see how to do on an opaque dataset.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#118

Post by ethbro »

gringoDan wrote: post #95

I think the responses to this can be broken down into a 2x2 matrix: level of concern vs. understanding of technology. 1) Don't understand ML; not concerned - "I have nothing to hide." 2) Don't understand ML; concerned - "I bought this device and now people are spying on me!" 3) Understand ML; not concerned - "Of course, Google needs to label its training data." 4) Understand ML; concerned - "How can we train models/c…

I like that matrix!

One thing that I think gets lost in engineers (and humans) is scale.

Googazon doing {thing} might be "meh" for 10 people. But the implications look very different when it's doing {thing} for 10%+ of a country's population.

At 10 people, I may find out Ted likes to eat Italian. At 10%, I may find out an Italian chain has a sudden health issue and short their stock.

Which is in essence their original playbook: do things that only work at a scale that only we can play at.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#119

Post by mgamache »

ethbro wrote: post #99
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

(IANAL, but) Not accurate in the US. Most states are either one party or two party consent states. One party = you can unilaterally record anything (not sure this includes things you're not actively involved with, e.g. spying). Two party = you must have consent of everyone in the recording. By a plain reading of two party consent statutes, people are in violation if their home speaker records a guest without obtainin…

My understanding of recording law is that in One Party states you need to be part of the conversation to record it. Speculation: This would mean that the device / owner would be in violation if the owner was not in the room?
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