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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

#31

Post by cblades »

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.

A large number of people already believe that devices and apps are constantly listening and sending recordings home, despite there being no evidence for that. It's a rampant belief supported by "I was talking to Jimmy about these shoes, and suddenly I got ads for those shoes!"

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#32

Post by this_was_posted »

cblades wrote: post #28
windexh8er wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three types of lies: lies of commission, lies of omission and lies of influence. Just because nobody "asked" Google (your example) doesn't mean Google didn't lie (and/ or mislead) about it (lie of omission). Most people assume machines are doing the voice processing. The game changes when there's a human with a, potentially, subjective thought process to what they're hearing.

No one that gives it more than a passing thought could fail to realize that there has to be some human interaction. Someone has to do manual transcription to check against output for some portion of the data.

But is it also natural to assume that this is done without explicit consent? With telemetry data for applications you can usually disable this kind of inspection of your data.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#33

Post by rayiner »

cblades wrote: post #28
windexh8er wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three types of lies: lies of commission, lies of omission and lies of influence. Just because nobody "asked" Google (your example) doesn't mean Google didn't lie (and/ or mislead) about it (lie of omission). Most people assume machines are doing the voice processing. The game changes when there's a human with a, potentially, subjective thought process to what they're hearing.

No one that gives it more than a passing thought could fail to realize that there has to be some human interaction. Someone has to do manual transcription to check against output for some portion of the data.

Why would ordinary people assume that this testing is done on live customer data? I understand that this is a common practice in the industry, it's not the only way to do the testing, and I'd bet it would surprise most people.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#34

Post by davemp »

cblades wrote: post #28
windexh8er wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three types of lies: lies of commission, lies of omission and lies of influence. Just because nobody "asked" Google (your example) doesn't mean Google didn't lie (and/ or mislead) about it (lie of omission). Most people assume machines are doing the voice processing. The game changes when there's a human with a, potentially, subjective thought process to what they're hearing.

No one that gives it more than a passing thought could fail to realize that there has to be some human interaction. Someone has to do manual transcription to check against output for some portion of the data.

> No one* that gives it more than a passing thought

*who has an understanding of ML

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#35

Post by dev_dull »

Is this honestly surprising to any developer? How can you develop a product like Siri/OK Google without being able look closely at edge cases? And if you have to record conversations to troubleshoot even extremely rare edge cases, you still end up with a system that allows this eavesdropping.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#36

Post by slg »

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.

Which is why all the complaints about these smart speakers have always seemed a little silly to me. Tapping into the audio of the phone we all carry with us everywhere is infinitely more valuable than tapping into a stationary speaker that is probably sitting in a room alone 90% of the time. It is also much easier to hide all the bandwidth associated with capturing all that extra audio since it has access to a network that the user doesn't completely control. Plus it has access to sensors like a camera and GPS that can reveal info that is even more private than audio.

TL;DR - If you don't trust Google's smart speakers, why are your trusting their phone software?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#37

Post by sp332 »

carlosdp wrote: post #19

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20402070 "People who install Google Home or Assistant are not advised that people can listen to the voice commands."

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#38

Post by danbruc »

Only 0.2 %? 1 out of every 500? That seems like a lot to me, especially given that there must be millions if not billions of interactions. How many of those things are out there? And how many interactions does the average user perform? And they keep them all? Forever? I could probably find the numbers myself or at least estimate them, I just don't care enough. I would however by happy to learn them if someone happens to know them.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#39

Post by danShumway »

carlosdp wrote: post #19

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.

In some ways, this is missing the point. To people working in machine learning, this isn't a revelation. To ordinary people, it is.

A common refrain that comes up in discussions about privacy is that ordinary consumers don't care about stuff like Google Home. They don't care about privacy, only weird tech people care about privacy.

However, the fact that articles like this get traction shows that a substantial portion of ordinary people don't understand what privacy they're giving up when they use Google Home. They didn't understand when they were installing the devices that a human was going to be able to listen to their recordings. And when they do understand that a human might be listening, that creeps them out.

This implies two things:

a) if properly informed and educated, normal people probably would care about privacy more. Part of the reason why it's mostly tech-people complaining about Google Home and Alexa is because it's mostly tech-people who understand what these devices do.

b) consumers aren't being properly informed about the privacy implications of devices like Google Home and Alexa, or else they wouldn't be surprised by any of this. If this news story is getting traction, it means that Google did not do a good enough job informing users about who had access to their data.

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