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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

#61

Post by Slartie »

slg wrote: post #36
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…

> 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.

However, it is pretty hard to hide the large drain on the battery if your phone constantly streams audio to someone via cell network. And I'd say, since most people are on a volume limited data plan, streaming gigabytes of data will not go unnoticed - people will wonder why their budget is being eaten up so ridiculously fast.

In contrast, smart speakers usually are connected to the power grid and WiFi, which effectively means unlimited bandwidth and power for eavesdropping purposes. The only way in which this might be noticed is if someone sniffs network traffic and wonders why this speaker sends so much encrypted data. But I'd argue that the probability for this case is much lower than the probability of raised eyebrows because of the aforementioned cell data plan being drained constantly.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#62

Post by colpabar »

jdsully wrote: post #52
Rapzid wrote: post #47

Doesn't seem much different than the disclaimer given when calling into a company that the conversation is being recorded for "QA and training" purposes(more like performance and CYA haha). I wonder how sensationalized people will get with the headlines for click-bait purposes. While "recordings" is technically correct, "interactions" may be a slightly more precise word to use in the headline. I'm imagining a ton of…

I don’t recall any google home device informing me that conversations may be recorded. Informing the user is the difference - not the actual recording.

I'd say the bigger difference is that a phone recording is initiated by making a phone call. Aren't Google Home devices listening 24/7/365 so they can know when to respond?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#63

Post by Mystrl »

bork1 wrote: post #2

I'm struggling to figure out how they have a Security and Response team to deal with the fallout of these issues without having enough privacy/security/customer-focused developers/product folks to proactively bring up these concerns. Google _seems_ like the type of company to do at least a little bit of risk modeling before the release of software. If they knew they were going to listen to recordings, how did this co…

Honestly what risk is there? Outside of some internet echo chambers no one really cares and all this will be forgotten by tomorrow if it even takes that long.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#64

Post by nocturnial »

scarejunba wrote: post #40

I have a Google Home in every room of my home. This only records after the trigger word, right? And it isn’t tied to my account? Well, then, I’m fine with it.

If you want raw data: out of the 1000 audio recordings the journalists could get their hands on, 153 were recorded without the trigger word.

Google provided those audio recordings to language experts for transcription without account information. The journalists managed to track down several people using only the audio and confronted those people with the audio. They confirmed it was indeed their voices.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#65

Post by scarejunba »

nocturnial wrote: post #64
scarejunba wrote: post #40

I have a Google Home in every room of my home. This only records after the trigger word, right? And it isn’t tied to my account? Well, then, I’m fine with it.

If you want raw data: out of the 1000 audio recordings the journalists could get their hands on, 153 were recorded without the trigger word. Google provided those audio recordings to language experts for transcription without account information. The journalists managed to track down several people using only the audio and confronted those people with the audio. They confirmed it was indeed their voices.

Like for the context-keeping? I know it’ll record post-response without an additional trigger phrase instance and that’s fine.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#66

Post by Medicalidiot »

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.

Finding out how the sausage is made is uncomfortable.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#67

Post by reaperducer »

yongjik wrote: post #57
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 portio…

As an ex-Googler, I'd like to say that "ordinary people" still won't understand what privacy they're giving up. Before the news, they underestimated it; not they overestimate it, but still without clear understanding of what's happening. A group of researchers listening to a random sample of audio clip with no way to identify actual speakers is very different from someone being able to look up your name and address a…

How else would they improve their search algorithm?

There are lots of ways. Ways that other industries test and refine without violating privacy.

One example: Having a group of people who sign up to be part of your testing. That way there's informed consent.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#68

Post by RHSeeger »

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.

I would think most people would think that they write software that can understand human speech, the same way they write software that can make a web page.

For the people that do realize it needs to be trained, most of them probably think that it's trained using internal data. Data created at Google or such.

Only people that really understand ML are likely to realize they need the scale of data only their customers can provide to do a really good job (_if_ they even do need that).

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#69

Post by RHSeeger »

dev_dull wrote: post #35

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.

The same way people debug things like web pages and applications that don't call home. You get reports of issues, you reproduce it locally, and you fix it.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#70

Post by RHSeeger »

cblades wrote: post #29
okmokmz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no evidence of any of these devices recording/sending voice data outside of when a query is going on. This isn't an example of a google device doing so, but there have been multiple cases of these "smart" home devices recording and/or sending audio when not prompted https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/family-claims-their-echo-s...

It was prompted, it's just that the match for the activation phrase was incorrectly identified. That's not the same thing as the near-universally believed internet truism that these devices are always listening and sending recordings home.

Mr Google Developer,

See here where you have it react and start phoning home when they say "Hey Google"? Right there, we're going to have you add some more terms; things like "jihad", "bomb", and a few others. We'll send you over the zip file of the full list later; it's only a few meg.

Yours Truly, TLA

Edit: I'm curious why the downvotes. It seems possible to me that the TLAs could have Google add more triggers for recording. If they did, we'd have no way of knowing. Sure, it's not likely, but it certainly seems possible.

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