51–60 of 131 posts
This may be tangential but I’m regularly amazed at how bad Siri is at basic things still. I’ll try to use it for things in front of guests on the HomePod and Siri is embarrassing half of the time
I've never quite gotten the allure of voice assistants myself, it just seems like a really frustrating way to use a computer.
This may be tangential but I’m regularly amazed at how bad Siri is at basic things still. I’ll try to use it for things in front of guests on the HomePod and Siri is embarrassing half of the time
I've never quite gotten the allure of voice assistants myself, it just seems like a really frustrating way to use a computer.
The librem cannot come fast enough.
please release it!
> “These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.” This should be in the title. Media was focusing on contractors listening to Google Assistant snippets not long ago — and those were anonymized . Private and identifying information was in the snippets, not metadata (the article mentioned this).
> and those were anonymized Hard to believe for Google context. They always trying to get the max possible data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's largely impossible to anonymize data you don't understand, isn't it? They have somebody transcribe the recording because they don't know what it said, so they can't know whether PII is in there. I suppose they might try to split it into multiple parts and have different people work on each part, but that may lead to problems, as you need the full sentence as context in some cases.
This. There's a nice paradox. Until the AI is good enough to understand the voice data, it can't know that it isn't privacy-violating -- up to and including extremes like somebody telling their most intimate secrets. Exposing this data to any other human, whether a subcontractor or internal employee, is a potential privacy violation, full stop.
Even if that transcript then still needs to be sent to the cloud for processing (eg for translating human sentences into logical actions might still be out of the grasp of home devices), developers can at least then send the data tokenised (which wouldn't be possible if it was a compressed audio stream) and then get a server response referencing those tokenised place holders.
A simplistic example of my point might be
Message:
I need to book a doctors appointment for erectile dysfunction.
Sent:
I need to book a $ARG[0] appointment for $ARG[1].
Received:
{
"action": "ring";
"subject": "$ARG[0]";
"message": "appointment for $ARG[1]"
}
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. There's a reason that evidence obtained illegally by the police can't be admitted in court, even if it proves some horrible crime. IMO the fair use of the law for the whole population is far more important than stopping one criminal.
"by the police" In this case it is not the police who obtained it. I think in some countries, not reporting crimes you know about could count as complicity.
Many HNers have a weird belief that Apple is somehow a privacy focused company, despite it actually being no more private than Facebook or Google. The main concern people have (voice assistants beside) is data gathering for ads, which Apple does for their app search, among other places. Also, their data centers are in China, which gives Chinese authorities full access to their iCloud account. If you want privacy, don…
Their datacenter for Chinese customers are in china. I expect them to take reasonable precautions, mistakes do get made. I'm not a user of voice assistants, I'd rather use the device directly, its faster anyhow. To quote from the article "Voice assistants appear to be yet another instance where a technology has been developed and adopted faster than its consequences have been fully thought-out."