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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

#101

Post by hyperman1 »

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…

Let's see. according to https://www.lifewire.com/megabytes-for-one-minute-conversati... , VoIP takes around 240 kb/minute, which is about 10GB/month.

Lowering quality and simply not recording when no one talks, should bring that seriously down, say 1GB/month.

Which is a lot today,but prices are falling rapidly.

If it's mandatory by law, implementing it in hardware would make sense, which will also lower the battery drain.

I don't like what I'm saying here, but recording and sending everything by law seems technically viable on the near future to me.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#102

Post by blueboo »

okmokmz wrote: post #78
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.

>It was prompted, it's just that the match for the activation phrase was incorrectly identified. Yes, so it recorded and sent audio when the user did not want it to. That's not any better. It'd be like if your gun went off while holstered, and you said that it was prompted to fire because the hammer hit the bullet despite the trigger not being pulled. It's very clearly not the intended functionality, so to trying to…

This analogy fails with the holster — as it is an explicitly deactivated state more aptly comparable to the voice assistants being muted/off.

Maybe you would be less surprised if the gun went off because you were waggling your finger inside the trigger guard rather than methodically squeezing it. The solution might be a higher trigger pressure threshold — akin to a more accurate voice trigger.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#104

Post by JLK_121416 »

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.

It's probably a Belgian television news item that initiated this, was all over the news today. +1000 clips were leaked to the reporter, who found some addresses in the clips, and went to these locations to confront the people living there. They also had some Google employees anonymously speaking about the things they hear: identifiable information, private conversations or actvities... Nothing shocking really, if you are a bit into IT stuff, but apparently most people aren't.

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2019/07/10/google-luistert-mee/

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#105

Post by danso »

Someone1234 wrote: post #99
danso wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Goo…

I think ordinary people have a vague sense of how computer memory and computation works. Because online queries happen near-instantaneously (relatively speaking), people don’t assume there’s a need for this data to ever be stored, or be accessed by anything else besides the “Google” program at the point in time of the query.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#106

Post by danso »

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 would you explain to an ordinary user why it's necessary for "your search will be recorded and preserved forever" in order to improve the search algorithm? As opposed to a limited timeframe?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#107

Post by blueboo »

Is the implication that we as a society would be horrified by a “Chinese room” voice assistant — a human responding to voice commands and performing an assistant’s tasks?

A service whereby this function is automated 100% of the time and very rarely requests are transcribed for QC by trusted partners (a failure point apparently) seems .. reasonable?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#108

Post by jefftk »

okmokmz wrote: post #21
smallgovt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

The irony of an account named smallgovt making this comment.... Personally, I'd rather risk get nuked by a crazy guy in his garage, as you say, than live in more of a police/surveillance state than we already do now

Depends on how high the risk is, no? If surveillance moved the risk from 90% to 10% I think most people would consider it worth it.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#109

Post by ryandrake »

GrapeFriedNiggr wrote: post #93
reaperducer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This assumes a fixed definition of “good.” I would argue that the search would be better because it was done using data collected only from parties who have given consent.

You can define “good” in terms of cost, revenue, sampling bias, relevance, etc. I can define it in terms of ethical data collection and usage. Who’s to say which definition is correct?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#110

Post by [deleted] »

danbruc wrote: post #38

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…

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