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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

#321

Post by a3n »

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…

I won't have one either. Well, I have my Android, which I guess is essentially the same.

I was visiting my neighbor the other day. We were wondering something about special counsel mueller, and she decided to ask Alexa. This was new, and I was surprised she had this surveillance device, but I didn't say anything.

There was some back and forth, then I said to her "I think you're ordering motor oil "

"Alexa, stop! Alexa, stop!" As if a dog was chewing on the furniture.

And now Amazon knows that I was discussing politics, and my opinion. That kind of analyzed data is going to be lucrative in some future military or law enforcement or political contract.

Rule 1. Don't leave money on the table.

Rule 2. Ever.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#322

Post by skybrian »

bogwog wrote: post #282
skybrian wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise safety concerns. What risks do you have in mind?

Identity theft, regular theft, harassment, stalking, sexual assault, discrimination, reputational harm, etc. Example scenario: I tell a friend that I voted for Trump, my Google home hears it, a Google employee eavesdrops, leaks on twitter that I voted for Trump along with my home address, the likely times I'll be in my home, and even the pin to disable my alarm, etc. Then a group of left-wing extremists uses that inf…

Whether these threats are realistic depends on how good Google's internal controls are. It's likely that there are Internet companies where internal controls are very weak (random Internet of things companies) and others where they are stronger. Stalking cases have happened, so you can say it's "possible," but to assess risk we need to do better than making a binary distinction between possible versus impossible.

In the case of the contractor described in this article, it sounds like they are pretty well isolated, so I don't see these scenarios happening: On the one hand, the audio snippets are more personal, being recorded in the home. On the other hand, having any idea who they're listening to will be rare, the snippets are short, and they are unlikely to hear the same person twice. I don't see them getting enough data to do damage.

You might compare with a store employee or waitress hearing a bit of conversation, or someone eavesdropping on your conversation or screen on a bus or plane. While people should be on guard, often they're not, and an eavesdropper can find out a lot more of any one person's data.

Other Google employees might have different access (for example tech support), but they'd be foolish to basically give employees remote root on Google Home devices, and I don't think Google security is that foolish.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#323

Post by bryan_w »

axaxs wrote: post #275
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…

Good breakdown. But I don't understand why any company thinks it is ethical to ever listen/record/send home data from -inside- a home. There are a plethora of public, or semi public places they could use to obtain real conversation(think of a subway, restaurants, DMV, etc). Set up a booth and let people talk to it. Using real speech from within someone's private quarters is disturbing IMO.

I dunno if I agree with you assessment, if you buy a device that purposefully made to record your voice and send it to a company, I wouldn't find it unreasonable that the company could listen to what I sent to them. It's not like they are being sneaky about when it is recording or where the recordings are going.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#324

Post by a3n »

Dextro wrote: post #263
JoshTriplett wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ask people for permission to send in mis-heard commands Note that you also want the "correctly" heard commands, because some of them will have been incorrect. It's frustrating when an assistant gives the "I don't know how to do that", but it's even more frustrating to get "OK, doing (the wrong thing)". Also, another alternative: provide an actual bug reporting channel. "Hey Google, report that as a bug" "Would you…

To be fair the system already has something like that. If you complain to the Home it'll ask if you want to provide feedback and give you a few seconds to verbally explain what went wrong. I'm not sure if humans will then review that feedback of if it goes through a speech to text algorithm first but the mechanism for feedback is there.

Yeah, i think I've experienced that. I was driving with Maps directions, and while i was driving Google decided to show me new things Maps can do.

I tried to voice my way back to directions, unsuccessfully. I said "Fuck you Google."

"I see that you're upset," followed by some instructions on how to give feedback. While I was driving. It sounded almost exactly like "I'm sorry Dave, I can't help you."

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#325

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

la_barba wrote: post #247
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no. Representative sampling is how we formerly did this kind of work. It wasn't particularly good or effective, but we didn't have the methods or compute to go beyond that. No longer.

You're free to have your own opinion, but anything specific beyond "it doesn't work"? I work in pharma, and we use representative sampling every single day in every single thing we do, and it works.

Representative sampling, does 'work' in the sense that it may or may not 'prove' whatever it is you had a question about. But the issue is that you effectively building in your assumptions about what is 'representative' into your sample. Its (imo) the central issue in the reproducibility crisis: our assumptions about the world and how that impacts the questions we ask about it.

It was previously intractable to do a census rather than a sample, and maybe for your purposes a sample is good enough or a census remains intractable. In my field , this is how things were done for decades (and still largely is), and even though (imo) it did a piss-poor job, it was good enough for some purposes. As piss-poor job is still better than knowing nothing. Maybe this is good enough for your purposes.

There's a third way however, which is to move beyond sampling and to perform a census. This is the difference I'm speaking of. We're at the point where we don't have to sample because we can measure. Effectively, this is what modern data science is. We've always had the ability to sample and interpolate. It doesn't work very well (imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) and usually is reflecting back to us something about our assumptions in how we sampled. But thats just it. We don't have to rely on a sample if we can take a census.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#326

Post by jjkaczor »

viklove wrote: post #291
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…

Do you have a smartphone? Why would you bring that listening device (the smartphone) into your own house out of your own volition? Please explain, because I am very perplexed.

It's relatively straightforward on a smartphone to monitor the battery and bandwidth consumption that active listening and deviceserver communications are occurring.

Of course - then, the next apologist will always say: "the devices only transmit when hearing the 'Wake Word'"...

Yeah, I don't think it takes an elite programmer to store/buffer audio, until the device hears the 'Wake Word', and then sends a "slightly" larger payload... (or batches several payloads)

The next level of enthusiast evangelist will then tell us that it is impossible for these devices to buffer/store that much audio data, because they have limited memory...

Yet, the same devices when used to play audio streams from the internet obviously have some sort of storage capacity to handle network glitches.

Spoken audio (which is probably recorded at standard telephone/cellphone sampling rates - after all, why train on audio that is significantly different than the audio coming from mobile phone devices) does not take up a dramatic amount of storage space.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#327

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

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...

Oh man. You should let Google know this so they can stop wasting money by paying people to label your data.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#328

Post by deepgrave4 »

anchpop wrote: post #262
Ensorceled wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why it's unreasonable for customers to have assumed this is like every other product: they developed it with employees and voluteers before shipping. After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world.

> After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world. How do you know? Is it not internet-connected?

It amazes me that people make statements like this without exercising any critical thought on whether it's true or verifiable. OP's car probably tells Toyota how much OP weighs, instantaneous speed, how hard OP pushes the brakes, favorite radio stations, turn signal usage, headlight usage, every on-screen computer action, seatbelt usage, gas level, current location, and identity of all other Toyotas in the vicinity (and more: use your imagination). The car has (presumably) cameras and (clearly) microphone(s) and bluetooth/wifi. But OP has it on faith that Toyota respects OP's privacy, because...

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#329

Post by lm28469 »

50656E6973 wrote: post #320
cronix wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bei…

Neatpick: "unabomber" as in UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber).

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#330

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

saagarjha wrote: post #66
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^This. I'm sure they're optimizing to only transcribe data they are pretty confident they got wrong (multiple requests; use has to go in and correct), but if you want software to do what the Google Home software does, you have to do this.

There are a lot of things that Google could have done better in this situation without meaningfully impacting their software's quality.

I guess. I'm still not of the opinion anything being done here is really 'wrong' (unless the annotators are mis-using the data).
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