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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

#151

Post by monkeynotes »

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…

Not to mention all the crap you type into your search bar, Gmail, images I upload, basically anything with any sort of machine learning backed enhancement. Any of that stuff could be sampled and reviewed by humans. Admittedly anonymised, but it's still potentially personal stuff just as the voice print data is.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#152

Post by Someone1234 »

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?

> And not to be anywhere near anyone else's listening devices.

No assistant records all the time, not Google, Amazon, or Apple. They listen for the "Wake Word" onboard using more primitive (and lower power consumption) Speech Recognition and only utilize The Cloud after the "Wake Word" (or phase) is spoken. You can confirm this using Wireshark.

You can view and listen to your recorded speech on the Google Account Dashboard.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#153

Post by bagacrap »

groovybits wrote: post #130
lovetocode wrote: post #108

I own 4 Home Minis, 1 Home and 2 Home hubs I honestly don't care so long as my data is used to improve the functionality and stability of my investment. It is quite another thing if they are selling my conversations to third-party vendors.

Per article: > The man, who wants to remain anonymous, works for an international company hired by Google. His job is to listen to the audio clips and to write out what he hears, so that Google can improve the speech assistant. So, > It is quite another thing if they are selling my conversations to third-party vendors. That is exactly what Google is doing.

"Selling" is when you trade goods for money. Google is paying money for a service. Pretty much the opposite of selling.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#154

Post by monkeynotes »

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?

I think when you buy a Google Home you basically accept some terms and conditions in the app to set it up. Buried in there is probably your consent to analytics etc.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#155

Post by white-power »

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Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#156

Post by flattone »

notinversed wrote: post #122
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…

You're getting too lost in the weeds here. It doesn't matter if a company takes your data, does a poor job of anonymizing it, and then decides to label it as "training" for their "AI" or if they just stick it all in a flat .txt files and process it in Fortran. It's the exact same thing. You should be mad about the data being saved and used. Splitting hairs over implementation details to try and find a loophole is jus…

1000000%

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#158

Post by jammygit »

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.

“... In some cases, teams use the audio of users’ voice requests as training data—all anonymized, Apple says.

> We leave out identifiers to avoid tying utterances to specific users, so we can do a lot of machine learning and a lot of things in the cloud without having to know that it came from [the user],” Joswiak said. In other words, Siri can learn things about users as a whole without tapping into individuals’ personal data.

> Apple holds on to six months’ worth of the user voice recordings to teach the voice recognition engine to better understand the user

> After that six months, Apple saves another copy of the recordings, sans user ID, for use in improving Siri, and these recordings can be kept for up to two years.

> The training happens on Apple’s servers, but the models only start practicing what they’ve learned when they’ve been deployed to your device.

> Once on the device, the models begin to run computations on things you type or tap into your device, or on things that are seen in the device’s camera, heard through the microphone, or sensed by the device’s sensors. Over time, this creates a massive pile of personal data on the device, as much as 200MB worth.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40443055/apple-explains-how-its-...

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#159

Post by okmokmz »

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…

>To me, category 3 is the most dangerous. Tech workers have a responsibility not just understand the technologies that they work with, but also educate themselves on the societal implications of those technologies. And as others have pointed out, this extends beyond home speakers to any voice-enabled device in general.

Yes I'm frequently amazed how many coworkers I have that are still completely plugged into Google, Facebook, Amazon services/spyware, fill their homes with internet enabled "smart devices", have alexa/google assistance etc, and yet they act like I'm paranoid when I try to discuss security concerns or just flat out don't care.

As much as I hate to say it, I think there needs to be a massive breach or abuse of power from one of these organizations/services that has severe real world consequences for those that utilize/support them. Until then nothing will change.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#160

Post by skybrian »

notinversed wrote: post #122
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…

You're getting too lost in the weeds here. It doesn't matter if a company takes your data, does a poor job of anonymizing it, and then decides to label it as "training" for their "AI" or if they just stick it all in a flat .txt files and process it in Fortran. It's the exact same thing. You should be mad about the data being saved and used. Splitting hairs over implementation details to try and find a loophole is jus…

You could also compare this to hospitals sending voice files to India to be transcribed. This is not automated at all. It's not clear that hospitals are any better at getting informed consent for this than Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription

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