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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

#311

Post by d1zzy »

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.

Does it matter how much they're payed? They're probably payed the right amount relative to the work they are doing.

Also how is having access to small samples of audio a privacy issue? Are they also receiving enough information to attach an identity to the audio clips? How long are the clips? Are they randomly assigned to humans? Do those humans get to listen to multiple clips from the same Home device and can they tell that's the case?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#312

Post by foobiekr »

cronix wrote: post #307
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'm in the 5th category. 5) Understand ML; concerned - won't allow any of these things in my house period because they will always use them for things behind the scenes that they won't state. I don't care how well trained they are, or "ethical." Ethical... according to who, and at what time period in the future? Ethics change. The data they have on you won't. Look at all of the politicians and other people getting in…

This. There’s nothing that binds today’s ethical company to voluntary ethical behavior when things get tough (or they get acquired).

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#313

Post by d1zzy »

electrograv wrote: post #90
hammock wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You paraphrased it in a different way and that might be why you're confused. Google says "the excerpts are not linked to personally identifiable information." To me that means the metadata is stripped, not that they strip anything out of the audio.

Thank you, good catch. I’ve edited my paraphrase to make it more accurate in this way. That said, it still sounds like Google is trying to convince us that the data they capture (not just the metadata) is never linkable to personally identifiable information, which if true would genuinely ease many privacy concerns here. As far as I know, just because data is not explicitly annotated with PII doesn’t erase the legal…

But in order to tell if it contains PII it has to be listened in by a human to transcribe it... It's like Schrödinger's audio assistant ;)

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#315

Post by d1zzy »

paganel wrote: post #131

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…

I would imagine that for the people that didn't grow up in such a country ruled by Securitate do not have the experience to make them fear being listened in. Not saying that they are wrong (they may turn out to be right), just that we are all products of our experiences.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#316

Post by 50656E6973 »

fwip wrote: post #202
einr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devices have a mute switch Why would I trust that this does anything at all?

Because you can check. Open it up, see what it does. Use Wireshark to inspect traffic. More importantly, anyone can check, and many people have. Imagine the scoop that "the mute switch does nothing" would be for a tech journalist.

>Because you can check. Open it up, see what it does. Use Wireshark to inspect traffic.

99.9% of users are incapable of doing this.

>Imagine the scoop that "the mute switch does nothing" would be for a tech journalist.

Google has already been caught doing this type of thing with location data:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/google-keeps-a-history-of-...

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#317

Post by d1zzy »

50656E6973 wrote: post #65
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…

>This is only creepy if you don't understand how the software works. No, its only creepy if you're not sure whether or not conversations had in the "privacy" of your own home are being listened to by a faceless person

I thought only samples of audio from speech that is addressed to the Home device (starts with "OK Google...") is sent to humans. That by definition makes it not a conversation in the privacy of your home, it's a conversation with the assistant just like having a phone conversation with someone else in the privacy of your home implies that someone else has access to the conversation.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#318

Post by deepgrave4 »

bduerst wrote: post #279
mLuby wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If the company has recordings, governments can hoover them up. And once one govt agency has them, sometimes other agencies get access. 2. Sounds like you're okay with Google using your private communication to enhance its products. So they can target you with ads based on your conversations with your spouse, children, or colleagues. 3. I just hope the algorithms understand context: Your spouse: son, put down the g…

Only if the government subpoenas your data individually. Also, the recorded data in this case is stripped of PII, meaning it's not linked to you. If you're still worried because you told Google your social security number, you can review what is stored, opt-out, and even mass delete the recordings at myactivity.google.com.

So you have faith that the government operates within the confines of the laws that it makes for itself, and faith that google is not sharing its data with government agencies or that google has not been infiltrated by government assets, and you have faith that google strips the PII from your data, and faith that when you tell google you want to opt out that they opt you out, and faith that when you want to delete something, google deletes it for you. If everyone simply plays by the rules, then there's nothing to worry about.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#319

Post by anticensor »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #283
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…

Uhhhhh??????? Unsupervised learning is totally a thing! Word embedding models are achieving STOA results on massive unlabeled corpuses . That's what's powering most of the new results in NLP. Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction folks just sitting here thrown out to dry too...

Unsupervised learning is even more black-boxy than supervised learning in terms of explainability.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#320

Post by 50656E6973 »

cronix wrote: post #307
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'm in the 5th category. 5) Understand ML; concerned - won't allow any of these things in my house period because they will always use them for things behind the scenes that they won't state. I don't care how well trained they are, or "ethical." Ethical... according to who, and at what time period in the future? Ethics change. The data they have on you won't. Look at all of the politicians and other people getting in…

>won't allow any of these things in my house period because they will always use them for things behind the scenes that they won't state.

As OP stated, "this extends beyond home speakers to any voice-enabled device in general".

Unless you're living like the Unibomber, it's not a matter of "just don't give it to them". The moment you step outside your house and socialize with almost anyone anywhere, it's liable to being taken from you.

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