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Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

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Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#11

Post by malvosenior »

vezycash wrote: post #8

If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Even if they currently can't, they'll soon make a law to grant them access to Google's and Amazon's. After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the…

> On second thought, there's a faster way to the goal. Just make smartphones listen all the time.

The good thing about trying this is people would definitely notice the increased bandwidth usage of their phone streaming audio in real time, all the time.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#12

Post by imglorp »

vezycash wrote: post #8

If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Even if they currently can't, they'll soon make a law to grant them access to Google's and Amazon's. After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the…

There have already been individual subpoenas of this device data. Only question now is, constant feed for fishing or targeted for individuals?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/alexa-free-speech

https://nest.com/legal/transparency-report

Personally I'm okay with court-ordered disclosures scoped to single individuals. There's oversight. But I'm not okay with unlimited constant data feeds for dubious "precrime" sweeps.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#13

Post by mehrdadn »

gibba999 wrote: post #10
azinman2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the privacy policy always warned about this. Everyone doing speech recognition is doing this — you have to in order to get any kind of QA. The caveat is that it should be both anonymizes as well as only in respond to the wake up command. It seems to be both, so I don’t see the problem. Actually I do — the editorializing of these headlines makes it seem nefarious when it’s not.

It is pretty nefarious. In traditional research and product development protocols, you would have people opt into something like this, and optionally pay them for it. If Google gave out a hundred thousand Google Home units for free to test subjects, with informed consent, there would be no big deal. It would cost Google $2.5 million, and it'd probably be enough data. If my web site policy discloses "I may randomly se…

> If my web site policy discloses "I may randomly send a thug to your house to shoot your children," and you come, visit, click through the license which warned you, and then I shoot your family, that doesn't mean I'm not doing something super-evil.

You kinda had me until you lost me here. Analogies need to make sense. If you have to go this far with your analogy then that says more about your own argument than the other side's.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#14

Post by mcbuilder »

mda wrote: post #6
jhayward wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.

What do you mean? All tech companies train their algorithms by annotating real world samples. It was not a secret.

I think that the outrage doesn't come from supervised learning, rather that it's contracted out to a third party and seems to be done in a irresponsible way. I think that the fact that most of the public that uses these devices would be surprised by the fact that their voice is being recorded and transcribed is the irresponsible part. Of course a ML engineer is going to want to go the route of human labeling the audio data, and these folks seem to have won. You can blame the public for being uniformed, but it's new technology, and most aren't going to have read up on the methods used, even if it's no secret. Many have suggested other opt-in methods, which would also provide (arguably less real world) data. I think that many would prefer to trade a less accurate service for not having strangers listen to their conversations.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#15

Post by flattone »

malvosenior wrote: post #11
vezycash wrote: post #8

If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Even if they currently can't, they'll soon make a law to grant them access to Google's and Amazon's. After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the…

> On second thought, there's a faster way to the goal. Just make smartphones listen all the time. The good thing about trying this is people would definitely notice the increased bandwidth usage of their phone streaming audio in real time, all the time.

People. Like 15% of hn users and the like

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#16

Post by smallgovt »

vezycash wrote: post #8

If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Even if they currently can't, they'll soon make a law to grant them access to Google's and Amazon's. After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the…

>> After this, a hijacking, explosion, or terrorist attack would occur. They would argue that it could have been prevented if place X had a listening device installed. And that's all it would take to push a law mandating the installation of such devices in open spaces, eventually private ones.

I agree that this hypothetical is an accurate depiction of the future, but I think eventually we'll see this as the better of two evils. As the pace of technology accelerates, the average crazy man is going to be capable of killing more and more innocent people. Eventually, creating a safe society is going to involve closely monitoring every citizen and weeding out bad actors. That, or, eventually, some crazy man is going to build a nuclear bomb in their garage and obliterate the world.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#17

Post by malvosenior »

flattone wrote: post #15
malvosenior wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On second thought, there's a faster way to the goal. Just make smartphones listen all the time. The good thing about trying this is people would definitely notice the increased bandwidth usage of their phone streaming audio in real time, all the time.

People. Like 15% of hn users and the like

I think everyone would notice the much higher data usage bill.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#19

Post by carlosdp »

I like to imagine sometimes how these kinds of "revelations" happen in tech newsrooms.

Reporter: Tell it to me straight, do you listen to the recordings? Google: Well yea, that's how we train the... Reporter: WE GOT 'EM!

It's like the "Apple admits throttling CPU when battery starts dying" story all over again. It wasn't a secret, you just didn't ask before.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#20

Post by swiley »

flattone wrote: post #15
malvosenior wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On second thought, there's a faster way to the goal. Just make smartphones listen all the time. The good thing about trying this is people would definitely notice the increased bandwidth usage of their phone streaming audio in real time, all the time.

People. Like 15% of hn users and the like

Between the larger phone bill and the decreased performance and battery life I feel like most people would notice.

Not to mention most phones heat up when they stream anything.

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