Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations • Hacker News Board

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#161

Post by vincent-toups » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

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 understand ML and I'm concerned, but my position isn't "how can we train models/collect data in an ethical way?" Its more like "Do we really need to train models like this?"

I continually come back to the same thought: The Amish (to take a random example) consume probably thousands of times less than I do. They do without the conveniences of technology which I "enjoy". They have neither computers nor an endless stream of distracting media and social interactions.

Yet they are probably, on average, as happy as or happier than other Americans.

These technologies don't really exist to serve people - they exist to create profit, and they do that by meeting superficial needs.

There is great potential for machine learning to help the human race. But the vast majority of energy dedicated to the question by the information megaopolies isn't invested in that direction except under the most facile sorts of hypercapitalist justifications.

We should, in short, regulate data collection and analysis into oblivion, with exceptions made only for democratically determined use cases which serve the public good.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#162

Post by delecti » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #138

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…

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)"

That's group 4. How is worrying about informed consent not just a subset of concern about the ethics of collecting training data?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#163

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

amacneil wrote: post #33

Serious question: how do people think the ML models for Home, Alexa, Siri, etc are trained, if not with human labeling?

People have never heard of ML. They think that there's a computer that listens to what they say, then does it. If they are interested in technical stories on tv news, they may think that what they say is sent to a computer at Amazon/Apple/Google/Wherever and the command is sent back; if they are not, they think that their phone is the computer.

I mean, we've told them that we're on the verge of AI (and to fear it), and we can tell a two year old to do something and they do it without having to hire somebody to help them understand us.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#164

Post by TheAdamist » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

hknd wrote: post #35

TheAdamist wrote: post #3

"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.

and how are they going to enforce the NDA? contractors are being paid peanuts in bad working conditions - firing them might land them a better job elsewhere, and they don't have any assets to sue for any kind of monetary damages.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#165

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

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…

It seems even worse than this - I'd argue your voice is personally identifiable information! The vast majority of these clips open with "Hey Google".

Meanwhile, Android allows you to personalize voice commands based on its ability to recognize that a specific person is the one saying "OK Google". Voice authentication has already reached high accuracy with a few seconds of unconstrained text, or a few words of fixed text. Voice identification on open sets takes more data, but sub-minute clips are still reasonably effective.

At the very least, Google itself could make a credible attempt to identify whether the speaker in any voice clip heard by Google Home is a regular user, and plausibly de-anonymize users of OK Google. More alarmingly, we're told that about 1 in 500 Google Home clips is heard by a human, and this employee apparently shared "thousands" of clips with a news organization. It seems plausible that anyone with access to any large voiceprint database could attempt to obtain clips from a random contractor and de-anonymize the most interesting or salacious content.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#166

Post by jammygit » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #29

duxup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Frank Herbert hit it a bit more on the nose: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank captures the motivation, the fact that it is desirable is the scary part. Akin to the genetic engineering scene from Gattaca.

Aldous Huxley got there earlier with A Brave New World as well. Speculative Fiction was ahead of the curve in that era.

Anyone want to recommend a book? Let me join in by suggesting the Asimov robot books, which I’ve just begun

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#167

Post by melkiaur » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

amacneil wrote: post #33

Serious question: how do people think the ML models for Home, Alexa, Siri, etc are trained, if not with human labeling?

Serious question: how do you think Home, Alexa, Siri, etc were trained before coming to the market ?

Another serious question: couldn't you ask ME to fix the data every so often (like the "improve this traduction" feature of google translate) ?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#168

Post by omnimkar69 » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

google employees liste to the recordings made with the smart google home speakers and via the google assistant app on smartphones. worldwide ex.belgium and netherlands people listen to those recordings to make the search engineer smarter. VRT NWS was able to listen to more 1,000 tracks thats why the employees must be listeing to the home conversations.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#169

Post by danmaz74 » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

When I give a voice command, I know that my voice could be recorded. What I'm actually concerned about is devices which are always listening, even when I'm not giving a voice command, and recordings from when I'm not interacting with the device potentially falling in the wrong hands.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#170

Post by groovybits » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #153

groovybits wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The concern remains the same though: Making user data available to a non-Google entity.

Do you care if Google makes money off of that trade? Really, they get value one way or another, because the analysis is incorporated back into the product.