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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

#391

Post by wolco »

WalterBright wrote: post #354
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…

Imagine 20 years from now you decide to run for political office. Do you want someone "ethically" going through all your old recorded conversations looking for statements that will be politically incorrect 20 years from now?

I would expect it. I would watch what I say now and in a few years what I think.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#392

Post by 8675309t »

anbop wrote: post #83
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…

How about Google PAY MONEY to generate training data or gather it from informed people? (“Make $100 by recording your voice for Google’s machine learning algorithms.”) not “Arms full with an infant? This $50 device will solve all your problems” and then shipping those recordings to third party contractors in unsecured facilities.

or at the very least allow people to opt out? pay to opt out?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#393

Post by taneq »

joshuamorton wrote: post #260
isostatic wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, group 4 is "we must collect training data, how do we get arround the ethical questions" Group 5 is "We must be ethical, can we still collect training data" Different priorities, different outcomes.

I don't see the distinction between "if we wish to do a thing, we must do it ethically when doing so" (4) and "we must act ethically if we do a thing" (5). If training data can't be collected ethically, do you think group 4 still would, or something? That just seems like trying to out yourself on an ethical high horse without a real distinction in action.

(4) isn't "if we wish to do a thing, we must do it ethically", it's "we're going to do the thing, how do we make it look ethical."

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#394

Post by taneq »

iamnothere wrote: post #184
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…

The Mycroft project has a better approach to this: "Mycroft uses opt-in privacy. This means we will only record what you say to Mycroft with your explicit permission. Don’t want us to record your voice? No problem! If you’d like us to help Mycroft become more accurate, you can opt in to have your voice anonymously recorded." (project is open source, at https://mycroft.ai/ ) Let people participate in R&D if they want…

Also there's a huge difference between short anonymized voice clips and taking a transcript of your entire house's audio, as a complete dataset, with your name and address on it.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#395

Post by clebio »

numbsafari wrote: post #58
gtirloni wrote: post #23

From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

It's not really a computer science issue, per-se. Operationally, though, here are a few thoughts: - Ensure that the persons doing this review do not have physical access to the systems outside of a secured environment (one in which outside audio and video recording devices are not allowed, and for whose presence is monitored, with physical access controls, etc.) Basically, not remote workers or a typical office envir…

> It's not ... a computer science issue.

full stop.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#397

Post by outworlder »

bscphil wrote: post #377
outworlder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I go further: do you own a smartphone? If not, you can ignore the rest. So, assuming you have a smartphone. That is a device which has: - Permanent network connection. Doesn't matter what you do on your Wifi, it has the cellular data network. Which is controlled by an independent processor with its own firmware - Excellent noise-cancellation microphones. They may not be able to pinpoint the sound source like a…

> Similar functionality to an Echo / Google Home / Apple whatever. They'll be listening for "hey siri" or "ok google" This seems to be a pretty big assumption, without which your whole argument falls apart. In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled. You could argue that the manufacturer of my phone could push a software update that enables it without my knowledge (in fact, they likely couldn't, becau…

> In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled

How do you know? Is your device _incapable_ of performing that task, or did you just click a checkbox somewhere? Because if you just politely _asked_ the OS to disable it, it doesn't really matter, does it? We are back to the matter of trusting the vendor.

> (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on)

So you say. The software may or may not agree with your statement.

> the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.

There's no "actual known spying". Spying implies intent, none has been demonstrated so far.

Where your argument falls apart (yeap, I can use that line too) is this: you are interacting with other people also carrying powerful listening devices of their own. They may or may not have disabled a "ok google" functionality, and they may or may not have disabled updates. Again, where do you draw the line? Do you ask everyone to leave their devices behind before interacting with them?

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#398

Post by Erik816 »

wolco wrote: post #391
WalterBright wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine 20 years from now you decide to run for political office. Do you want someone "ethically" going through all your old recorded conversations looking for statements that will be politically incorrect 20 years from now?

I would expect it. I would watch what I say now and in a few years what I think.

Or intentionally don't watch what you say and stop giving this kind of system any power. If you run for office in 20 years planning to hide what you think now, or apologize for it, then you're in for a losing battle. Say what you think, admit when you're wrong, learn from your mistakes.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#399

Post by jononor »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #386
jononor wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 bucks for anyone who uses a 50 year model/method and get within twice the word-error-rate of today's speech recognition systems. Also, how do you explain the progress on ImageNet challenge over the last 10 years? Each method there uses the same dataset, yet error rates (top5) have gone from 30% in 2011 to around 3% in 2016.

Faster computers, and more of them.

Not going to deny that faster GPUs has helped a lot. But it is not the full picture either. DenseNet-121 has higher accuracy than VGG16, yet requires only 1/15 the storage space, and 1/5 the number of operations during inference. I'm pretty sure training time is faster also.

Re: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

#400

Post by m0zg »

I don't get why anyone is surprised by this or why the outrage is restricted to only Google Home. Google employees and contractors are listening, viewing, and reading stuff from time to time in order to provide labels to their deep learning systems. Moreover, you've consented to this when you created your account or in some cases just used their services without an account.

You can't really have useful machine learning without lots of annotated data quite yet, and Google prides itself on useful machine learning.

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