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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.
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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.
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> If Google and it's outsourced partner can listen to the recordings, 3 lettered agencies can too. Just to be clear, if this were true, it would only apply to specific queries you make, not all audio data in your house. There is no evidence of any of these devices recording/sending voice data outside of when a query is going on.
>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...
These are also fairly rare bugs, so it's still very far from "device listening to everything you do", which implies malice. If it was trying to spy on you, it wouldn't light up and make a beep every time it was listening... That sounds like very bad spying to me.
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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…
Analogies need to be analogous. Counterexamples can be extreme (and it is often helpful if they are; then they're obvious counterexamples).
Please take a minute to reread the discussion.
Coincidentally, I've noticed a pretty consistent pattern of downvotes on anything criticizing Google on Hacker News. Either a lot of readers from Google who drank the cool aid, or astroturf -- I'm not quite sure which.
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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.
* If my privacy policy is a copy of HIPAA, that's an ethical privacy policy.
* If my privacy policy is as Google's here, it seems unethical without clear informed consent (which a disclaimer in a novel-long privacy policy doesn't provide).
* If your privacy policy says you'll collect incriminating information about me, and sell it to the highest bidder for use in blackmail, it's unethical even with attempts at informed consent.
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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?
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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…
That's not really how it's done though. The government would pipe all the data into something like Palantir, not request individual data piecemeal.
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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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I've banned this account for now, but if you want to email hn@ycombinator.com a new username, we can rename the account and unban it for you.
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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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They have the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this, not to investigate the fact that they do it. They're there to plug the leak.
Come on, I'm sure Google's privacy policy allows them to listen to audio with no metadata in order to improve their service. The team is responding to the public leak of the audio, which is a violation of Google's privacy policy.