Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

techerati.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 138 posts

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#81

Post by crooked-v »

smattiso wrote: post #72
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.

Not necessarily, speech to text engines are pretty decent so it's conceivable a listening device could just send the transcript.

If the point is to train speech to text analysis, just sending the transcript doesn't help.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#82

Post by nocturnial »

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…

>A group of researchers listening to a random sample of audio clip with no way to identify actual speakers

Actually the journalists who obtained those audio clips identified several people. Those who were willing to talk on camera confirmed it was indeed their voices.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#83

Post by inflatableDodo »

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.

I'd love to see this tactic played out in divorce proceedings. - "I wasn't having a secret affair. You just never asked if I was sleeping around."

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#84

Post by UncleMeat »

RHSeeger wrote: post #70
cblades wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Downvotes because the NSA isn't magic. We know how the legal boundaries of their power work from the Snowden leaks. It wouldn't be possible for them to force Google or whoever to do this.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#85

Post by davesmith1983 »

thfuran wrote: post #71
stefan_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You recruit people for testing and obtain their informed consent? What do people here think how say medicine or research is developed?!

I think medical software works on pretty much exactly model the parent comment describes, where software developers commonly have access to (anonymized) patient data and less commonly and less readily to unanonymized patient data.

I worked for a year with Patient Medical Data in the NHS in the UK. Typically it is as simple as script to replace patient names after downloading a live backup. You then delete the backup of the DB that has the real names.

That is pretty much it.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#86

Post by mtgx »

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…

> not they overestimate it

I disagree with this because you're assuming that Google "just training its systems with this data" doesn't mean that it will do "anything nefarious" with it.

Oh, yes, it totally will. That's the entire point. I don't see Google as much more ethical than say Facebook these days. They'll screw their users for an extra buck in the next quarterly results just as much.

Why do you think they're now helping China spy on their citizens? They didn't have to do it. But the call of (more) money is irresistible.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#87

Post by NikolaNovak »

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.

That is fundamentally incorrect.

My 74 years old father in law uses Google Assistant and Google Home way more than I do; they are a brilliant way for him to interact with technology.

He has absolutely no inkling that any of that leaves the little gray device in his kitchen, let alone any "Cloud" thing in the background, let alone that anybody is listening to it.

He would be genuinely, completely surprised, and is likely to be very uncomfortable, to be presented with any of these facts.

I will venture that he's more representative of an average user than you or I; as techies, we must consciously remind ourselves that most people are not techies, otherwise our view of society will be skewed in the extreme. :-/

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#88

Post by UncleMeat »

stefan_ wrote: post #45
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.

You recruit people for testing and obtain their informed consent? What do people here think how say medicine or research is developed?!

And now you don't have broad coverage of accents.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#89

Post by danso »

Someone1234 wrote: post #60
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…

> To people working in machine learning, this isn't a revelation. To ordinary people, it is. The product's tagline/marketing lead is literally: "Get answers from Google." Why would ordinary people who purchased a product to "Get answers from Google" be surprised when it sends the questions to Google to get answers from Google..? You don't need to be an ML expert to read the product's marketing and use basic reasoning…

You might need to talk to more ordinary people. Most people are very surprised at what data of theirs is stored, even for blindingly obvious features -- e.g. the list of everyone you've ever blocked on Facebook, which, obviously, is a list FB must store at some point in order to enforce it. Find an ordinary person and ask them to download their data from FB and Google and see if they aren't surprised.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#90

Post by davesmith1983 »

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.

It is probably buried in their T&Cs.
Post reply on HN