I grew up as a kid in a country ruled by Securitate [1], one of the few institutions that rivaled the East-German Stasi when it came to spying on its own citizens, and as such I'm very, very perplexed of why would anyone bring in a listening device in his/her own house out of his/her own volition. And those people even pay for the privilege of having their home-lives actively monitored and listened to almost all the time, it's crazy.
Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
131–140 of 463 posts
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#132Well of course you will have some qa / quality monitoring just as you will with telecoms and I seem to recall that the Dutch go in for monitoring of phones in a big way.
Also does that article remind me of the Monty python sketch "news for wombats"
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
So this outrage is in the Netherlands. Security cameras may not be pointed by businesses at public space (which we have a lot of unlike the US). The local government itself may place cameras though but private parties, what kind of nightmare situation is that?
And in public or private space when there are cameras there needs to be signs everywhere to warn and inform you.
So in the Netherlands at least.. Google recording a conversation with someone who doesn't know Google is recording is definitely illegal.
The question is: will they prosecute? Then it becomes a geopolitical question because we are a small country with a disproportionate number of Google datacenters.
So to summarize:
- This is definitely illegal in the Netherlands
- There is no consent of others participating and you really do need that
- Fine print is not consent: consent of terms and conditions requires a majority (determined by polling or common sense of a judge) of users to be aware and knowledgeable what they consented to.
- there won't be prosecution by the Dutch public prosecutor.
- there will be a lobby for the EU to buttrape Google but it may use different reasons or context
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you square that with a security cameras? Do you need to consent every time you enter a space secured by them?
There are some rules concerning security cameras as well. I recently found out that private CCTV (at least in the UK) can't record public areas (e.g only your porch). Someone got sued over this recently. There have been some stories in HN about opting out of face recognition as well. Maybe the laws for video are different as the other reply says, but there are privacy concerns in there as well. edit: here's a list of…
> There have been some stories in HN about opting out of face recognition as well
Easiest way to do that is to wear a niqab or burka.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#135There are two big things right now on my list of things I will never use: closed remotely operated home assistants with cameras or microphones that are not physically switched, and Facebook Libra.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay beta testers who know what they're signing up for? Train the software with previously human transcribed audio (like TV/audiobooks/etc)
How about 2 Google Homes: The $100 Privacy version and the $30 Opt-in Testing version. That way some people get their privacy and I get Chicken Little to subsidize my cheaper IoT products. =)
The problem with this is that "Chicken Little" is probably not an adventurous person, but rather a poor person. This makes privacy another privilege that can be bought. This devolves into another way to exploit poorer people.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#137"The man, who wants to remain anonymous, works for an international company hired by Google. " So not a Google employee at all, a probably low paid contractor who is in possession of thousands of audio files. Your privacy matters, except when the bottom line is involved.
What is doubly concerning here is that the contractor was in a position to demonstrate how the system worked to the reporters. That would seem to indicate they have access to that data in a non-secured environment. I'm not familiar with EU law around these things, but I would imagine there is some kind of whistleblower mechanism available, and a right for authorities to audit/inspect such activities?
I would expect that a telecoms employee who was doing similar work on quality etc to be quite securely vetted.
If I was doing now what I did back in the day For BT / Dialcom (I had root on the UK's main ADMD) I would probably have to pass DV vetting (TS in USA terms)
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#138I 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…
5) Understand ML; concerned - "Why do other people in the ML industry think it's OK to use and store peoples data in without informed consent (which are only those in group 3, and group 1+2 don't have informed consent)"
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#139"The man, who wants to remain anonymous, works for an international company hired by Google. " So not a Google employee at all, a probably low paid contractor who is in possession of thousands of audio files. Your privacy matters, except when the bottom line is involved.
The person is probably a temp/vendor from a consulting company (think accenture or cognizant), who should've signed the same NDA agreements as anyone working on that stuff.
But whose machine monitoring, security, and use habits almost definitely do not match the requirements Googmazon would require for its own employees. These vendors, time and time again, end up being the weak spots in companies' and governments' handling of sensitive information.
Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
#140So 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…
anyway to just flood the microphone channel with spurious training data 24/7?