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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

#91

Post by maemilius »

Slartie wrote: post #61
slg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 unnotic…

People have to charge their phones eventually. The easy way to do this is to store the recordings locally and only transmit when the phone is already charging.

If we're already considering government intervention, why wouldn't they just require that internet providers of all kinds _not_ meter data sent to them?

Unless our hypothetical government agency _really_ needs real-time data, there are plenty of ways they can mask their activity in a way that users won't ever notice.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#92

Post by rando444 »

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.

But we know how this revelation happened.

One of their "language experts" (subcontractors) shared the recordings with the news media.

He did this because the recordings he was concerned about were of people who didn't know they were being recorded or talking to the speaker.

This article and your comment manage to spin this entire story into Google talking points.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#93

Post by GrapeFriedNiggr »

reaperducer wrote: post #67
yongjik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yeah, but it would be way more expensive and you would have orders of magnitude less data. There are also issues with biased sampling.

Point being, the search wouldn't be as good.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#94

Post by UncleMeat »

saagarjha wrote: post #53
mehrdadn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

You're missing the point, which is that you can slip anything into a privacy policy or other long agreement, no matter how outrageous it may be, and nobody will read it. Putting anything there does not make it ethical or legally binding.

It also doesn't make it unethical. Putting privacy related issues in a privacy policy makes sense to me.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#95

Post by Ididntdothis »

danShumway wrote: post #39
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 portio…

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

The non-tech people I know assume that this data is used by highly qualified people in tightly secured areas and not by underpaid contractors somewhere in the world.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#96

Post by rvnx »

davemp wrote: post #34
cblades wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the adjacent question is, are humans watching Google Nest cameras to train ML models ? the answer is not so clear

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#97

Post by RHSeeger »

UncleMeat wrote: post #84
RHSeeger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that the Snowden leaks taught us that they completely ignore their legal boundaries on a regular basis.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#98

Post by mherdeg »

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.

Well, you could get your test data from paid participants who consent to constant whole-home recording. Like the "Nielsen Families" of old.

This would be worse data than just using all available inputs to train your model, but it's an alternative. There are alternatives to storing all input data for later training; they likely produce worse models and cost more, but they are available.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#99

Post by Someone1234 »

danso wrote: post #89
Someone1234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being surprised about things you've forgotten you did on a service, and reading a product's own marketing (and core functionality) aren't really comparable.

I just asked a non-tech person behind me if they thought that when you asked Google Assistant a question it was sent to Google to answer, and they shrugged and said yes like it was a stupid question.

What ordinary person doesn't understand that when you asked Google a question that Google knows the question you asked? It doesn't make sense.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#100

Post by Zhyl »

reaperducer wrote: post #67
yongjik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>If you type anything into Google's search box, your search will be recorded and preserved forever so that Google's engineers can analyze usage patterns. How else would they improve their search algorithm?

Or only retain the data for a set period of time. You can refine indexes with 6-12 months of data. You'd only want to keep unaggregated data for more than that if you were building profiles of individual people.

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