Live data from Hacker News

Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

arstechnica.com

111–120 of 131 posts

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#111
post #28

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."

> Their datacenter for Chinese customers are in china.

Why is it okay for an American company to allow foreign, human right violator governments to spy on their citizens?

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#112
post #90
post #57

Ordered a nice far field microphone and raspberry 4. Gonna try to build my own voice assistant with Mycroft.

Does Mycroft need a network connection for voice recognition to work? I wasn't able to conclusively tell from a quick scan of their website but their Get Started document[1] says "Mycroft devices need to be paired with your Mycroft Home account to work", which sounds like it does. I had been intending to do something similar to you, but using Snips[2] since it supposedly has on-device voice recognition (and use of Ru…

Yeah it uses a mozilla cloud speech api. I gather one can run it locally though (Deepspeech).

So not too worried about this aspect.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#113
post #97
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Mycroft need a network connection for voice recognition to work? I wasn't able to conclusively tell from a quick scan of their website but their Get Started document[1] says "Mycroft devices need to be paired with your Mycroft Home account to work", which sounds like it does. I had been intending to do something similar to you, but using Snips[2] since it supposedly has on-device voice recognition (and use of Ru…

The Mycroft Home stuff covers Google Speech to Text, so I'm betting that overall speech processing is done in the cloud, though I'm sure wake-word detection is done locally. https://mycroft.ai/documentation/home-mycroft-ai-pairing/

Yeah - but not google - they switched to mozilla deepspeech. You can run deepspeech locally, but needs something reasonably powerful

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#114
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Safely) Creating a reminder while driving is very handy.

I don’t think you should be doing that while driving. The one argument that I do see is while cooking and your hands are covered in flour or something. That’s just a really niche usecase.

People shouldn't talk while driving? Yikes. I mean, I know it affects concentration and I suppose that means it probably increases accidents at some level, but speaking a thought out loud when you remember you need to do something seems pretty innocuous to me.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, it’s highly ignorant to refer to pedophilia as a “crime”. Please be aware that pedophilia is not in fact a crime at all. It in fact refers to the attraction one had toward pre-pubescent children. Be aware that this is entirely different than being a child rapist. I assume you meant to say “child rapists” in your statement. In the same way it’s generally accepted that homosexuals and heterosexuals don’t c…

"Child rapist" is pretty specific. Consumption/distribution of CP is also heinous and harmful.

Why would consumption, production or distribution of synthesized CP be heinous? Who exactly is the victim?

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#116
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, it’s highly ignorant to refer to pedophilia as a “crime”. Please be aware that pedophilia is not in fact a crime at all. It in fact refers to the attraction one had toward pre-pubescent children. Be aware that this is entirely different than being a child rapist. I assume you meant to say “child rapists” in your statement. In the same way it’s generally accepted that homosexuals and heterosexuals don’t c…

> One could say they’re “cursed” to be given that sexual preference they were born with. Were they, though? I did some light research for a university course many years ago and from what I understand/remember, many pedophiles were themselves abused in their childhood, which can really mess up a developing brain. Still cursed, just in a slightly different even more tragic way.

> Were they though?

I suspect the propensity to rape is what is learned. I’d question whether the pure attraction is formed by the abuse you describe.

We should recall those a decade ago, suggesting that homosexuality was a “disorder” needing to be cured. A disorder implying that it was caused by some incident. Clearly that line of thinking is outdated and offensive to many.

Either way the source is of the attraction is moot. The fact is we live amongst pedophiles and there’s no reason they should be reviled.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#117

Apple is playing fairly dangerous game, positioning themselves as some kind of saint, or tron, fighting for the user. Firing shots at all tech companies for collecting data can backfire at them. Like it does in this case. It shows that they’re likely overselling what they can do without your data, and to deliver they your data anyway - they just try to be quiet about it. Of course there are different level of data co…

I have a theory that Apple chose the privacy route because it was their only serious way to compete. Apple simply doesn't have the AI chops to compete with Google.

They were already years behind in ML when they started their privacy marketing and possibility even further behind now. Since they can't compete on ML features their only other option was to compete on privacy.

Apple is taking the calculated risk that people will be willing to sacrifice features in exchange better privacy. If they're right it will pay off massively. If they're wrong it could be very bad for them.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#118
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who doesn’t use any digital assistants, voice activated or not, I’m facinated by the marketing and media hype. It’s still not clear to me why anyone would want them.

(Safely) Creating a reminder while driving is very handy.

Voice memos were a thing before we had voice assistants. Hell in the 15-20 years before that we even had plenty of automatic voice-memo systems that could be activated with a simple command.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#119
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet it’s closer to 0.99% otherwise wouldn’t they have phrased it something like “slightly more than 0.1%” to make it sound smaller?

If I was talking to a reporter and the real number was .01% I would still say "less than 1%" to make sure I was properly understood. The whole reason we use percentages and say "one percent" instead of "point zero one" is that some people tend to get confused with decimals but not with integers. EDIT: And part of this is just how we say things. "Twenty" is just easier to parse in a conversation than "Two Oh" even tho…

1% vs .01% would be overstating the truth by 100x. If you were a spokesperson for apple you would want to make that number seem as small as possible.

Re: Siri records fights, doctor’s appointments, and sex, and contractors hear it

#120
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

> Their datacenter for Chinese customers are in china. Why is it okay for an American company to allow foreign, human right violator governments to spy on their citizens?

Okay? It's not really. But it's the price of cheap labor in China and any other incentive they have for doing business there. Everything done in China comes with a no-privacy guarantee you can't take a shit in China without them knowing the color and consistency.
Post reply on HN