Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is probably buried in their T&Cs.
Since I only see them at friend's houses - I'm not a party to any of those contracts.
Yes however it is their property and their device so there is implicit consent.
Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
131–138 of 138 posts
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Between the larger phone bill and the decreased performance and battery life I feel like most people would notice. Not to mention most phones heat up when they stream anything.
It's a shame this doesn't happen when people's IoT devices become botnet nodes on their "unlimited" wifi. It would totally change the DDoS market and IoT security for the better. "0/5 stars. This product doubled my bandwidth bill."
I will never ever ever go back to paying by the byte though.
No one writes sane enough software (or even freaking documents) to make that doable.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I only see them at friend's houses - I'm not a party to any of those contracts.
Yes however it is their property and their device so there is implicit consent.
I could consent to it using AI to answer. But how could I consent to it recording me when I was never informed?
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the privacy policy always warned about this. Everyone doing speech recognition is doing this — you have to in order to get any kind of QA. The caveat is that it should be both anonymizes as well as only in respond to the wake up command. It seems to be both, so I don’t see the problem. Actually I do — the editorializing of these headlines makes it seem nefarious when it’s not.
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…
What’s specifically super evil about humans transcribing random and anonymous commands to the google assistant? They’re hired and expected to be professional with their own contractual agreements around their own behavior and ethical standing.
Literally all the major companies in speech rec (aka assistants) do exactly this. The accuracy of the speech models would be extremely poor otherwise.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a shame this doesn't happen when people's IoT devices become botnet nodes on their "unlimited" wifi. It would totally change the DDoS market and IoT security for the better. "0/5 stars. This product doubled my bandwidth bill."
I will never ever ever go back to paying by the byte though. No one writes sane enough software (or even freaking documents) to make that doable.
I think it's necessary in the long run. It's the only way anything will ever change. And bandwidth is a finite, shared resource. You also pay per electron that flows through your blender and drop of water you drink from your faucet.
Right now the internet is basically built on a bunch of "gentlemen agreements" to play fair, all the way from BGP down to ISPs ("please filter egress, pretty please!") to end-users ("please don't actually use all of your bandwidth because we're overprovisioned!").
Of course, the fee has to be tiny. For example, you don't reconsider hydrating yourself to save some money. But you may reconsider leaving your heater on 24/7 when you can just wear a jacket indoors. It would have to be priced similar to that. Though other things will have to change as well, like we'd need the ability to shop between ISPs in a region.
Most people are already paying per byte, but in the most roundabout marketing-mislead way and I see that as a problem that only really helps ISPs. Imagine if it was a fully commoditized utility instead.
On the other hand, look at the effects of the status quo. People have so little insight into their usage that you can buy enough residential botnet egress to take down any site for $5 which empowers centralization like Cloudflare DDoS protection. I suppose you either don't see this as a problem or you can think of other solutions.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's some muddy water between
- What the written laws allow (or don't disallow)
and
- What the constitution allows
I would say the various TLAs have been working outside "the law" insofar as what the constitution allows.
Re: Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does that contradict what I wrote above?
> the security and response team activated because someone disclosed that they do this
They're not chasing down a whistle blower for notifying the public that human transcription takes place. That information was already in the public domain in Google's privacy policy. The team is investigating the source of the leaked audio files, which was a violation of user privacy.