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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

#111

Post by malvosenior »

safog wrote: post #80
ben_jones wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to put it a little simpler: Way fewer units would've been sold if consumers knew third world contractors would be listening to their private home conversations. If the way you make your meat is messy, you have an obligation to share that at the dinner table if you are a good actor.

Why does it matter if it's Americans listening to it vs third world contractors? Also Google and Amazon are a large American companies that mostly try to do the right thing in terms of user privacy. I'd be more concerned about the random IoT microwaves and fridges made by a small company in China or Japan with their own assistant features built in sending audio to god knows where. Atleast I can reasonably trust the w…

> Also Google and Amazon are a large American companies that mostly try to do the right thing in terms of user privacy.

Google has an atrocious record when it comes to user privacy. They're the people who put a hidden microphone in Nest thermostats for instance.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#112

Post by vharuck »

mehrdadn wrote: post #13
gibba999 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty nefarious. In traditional research and product development protocols, you would have people opt into something like this, and optionally pay them for it. If Google gave out a hundred thousand Google Home units for free to test subjects, with informed consent, there would be no big deal. It would cost Google $2.5 million, and it'd probably be enough data. If my web site policy discloses "I may randomly se…

> 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…

>If you have to go this far with your analogy then that says more about your own argument than the other side's.

I never got this argument. In mathematical proofs, reducto ad absurdum is an acceptable method of showing an assumption false. It shows that a statement ("Users agreed to TOS, so it's not malign") has an exception. The example is extreme to make sure nobody can argue the statement's still valid.

He's not saying the punishment should be on par with murder. He's just saying there is a line of moral acceptability, but where it lies is up for debate.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#113

Post by UncleMeat »

RHSeeger wrote: post #97
UncleMeat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true at all. The key element of the Snowden leaks was that the legal boundaries were not where we expected them to be. The telephony metadata collection program, for example, was fully legal but has way wider impact that people considered to be right.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#114

Post by Someone1234 »

danso wrote: post #105
Someone1234 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your point was that "ordinary people" don't grasp the concept that it is Google, or Amazon, or Apple that is providing the answers when they use a Voice Assistant. In spite of their entire marketing saying exactly that.

They don't need to understand "computer memory or how computation works" to grasp that the person/entity you ask a question to, has to know that question in order to provide an answer. In fact you could have never used a computer and grasp that concept.

You're trying to make this more complex to mask the fact it is a logically flawed premise.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#115

Post by danShumway »

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…

"Being sent to Google" is absolutely the wrong way to phrase this question. Of course people understand that the device with the word Google written on it sends information to Google. That has nothing to do with the current story.

Better questions:

"Do you understand that when you ask Google Assistant a question, a human might listen to it and not just an AI?"

"Do you understand that the human might not be a direct employee sitting in a Google office -- that they might work for 3rd-pary company that Google just contracts out to?"

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#116

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#117

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

With nest debacle I sent a message to 'my' senator ( this time I will send a postcard I guess ) after nest hidden microphone debacle. I got a non answer after a month. How much money you need to own a senator. I am not even joking. There has to be a way to crowdsource this.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#118

Post by scarejunba »

nocturnial wrote: post #74
scarejunba wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It mentioned it was probably due to misinterpreting some words as the trigger phrase. They formulated it as "any word that remotely sounds like google could trigger it"

Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’d definitely want them to first have humans view the trigger phrase time before they okay viewing the remainder.

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#119

Post by danbruc »

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…

In response to a deleted comment that said the following. [2]

Google is not training one language model, but many of them (I'd estimate ~70 language models from the voice settings menu on my phone). So 0.2% in total doesn't sound too unrealistic to me as this should be closer to 0.002% per language.

There is a large variation of the number of speakers between different languages. What would they want to do? Aim for the same number of training points for each language? Then for a language with 20 times fewer speakers - Thai compared to English - they would have to look at 4 % [1] of all interactions in Thai. Add to this that the distribution across languages is most likely very skewed, i.e. languages spoken in poorer regions of the world have a lot fewer users than languages spoken in richer regions.

Or maybe they want more training points for more frequently used languages, then, if they aim for a number of training points proportional to the number of interactions, every interaction has a 0.2 % chance of being used as a training sample regardless of the language. If you perform two interactions per day - and I will happily admit that I have not the slightest clue whether this is even on the right order of magnitude, I have never used any such system - then you reach 500 interaction within one year, which means that after one year of usage you have a reasonable chance that at least one of your interactions has become a training point.

[1] Probably not actually true because due the large number of English speakers the percentage for English would most likely be less than 0.2 % but right now I can not be bothered figuring out the correct numbers.

[2] Meta question - would this generally be consider acceptable without naming the user that made the comment? Or should deleted be deleted?

Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

#120

Post by godelski »

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…

I'd also like to add that most people don't understand what can be done with all this data. If you start explaining even simple examples so people they think you're a conspiracy theorist, unless they're already a conspiracy theorist then they "already know". But a simple example like the story of Target mailing coupons to a house with a pregnant teenage daughter. Many people still think that's impossible or the father hard to be really dumb not to notice the girl was pregnant. As techies we look at that sorry and say "well duh, that's not even that difficult" while non techies have a hard time comprehending how that's possible. This is a huge disconnect. So I'd argue that even though some people understand that they're giving up their data that they don't understand how it can be used.

My favorite example is just waiting for someone to mention how Facebook must be listening to them because they had a conversation in private with their friend about something, say an extremely new found interest that "they've never talked about before ever". I'll explain how the process works and how we can connect certain things together, how there is proximity, and knowing social groups and structures. That while the microphone would be useful, it isn't necessary for a good guess (and that it is a guess). I think most people here would say "well duhh" but try it with your relatives, see how crazy they think you are and that it has to be a microphone.

There's a big disconnect, this is a problem.

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