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Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

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Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#2
I’m genuinely concerned about data privacy, but I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve, but I feel like all this could have been avoided by just explaining that this was how the service was able to improve... I’m sure more steps could be taken to anonymise data from the people doing the transcripts, but I feel the best part of this is to improve the wake word detection to reduce the false positive rate.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#5
People have really bad intuitions around privacy. The predominant mental model is that there is a single, motivated adversary who is uniquely interested in attacking them. In reality, privacy almost always involves large, impersonal systems ingesting masses of data to either increase profits or commit crimes.

It may sound bad that some random person is hearing your sex sounds but that person has heard a thousand other equally anonymous sex sounds and truly could not give less of a shit that the sound is of someone having sex. Similarly with leaking financial information, anyone capable & willing to defraud people based on this information has much better ways of generating ROI than hoping on the one snippet of information in a million that could lead to a breach.

It's similar to that time it was revealed a bunch of iOS apps were screen recording users using the app. Having worked at companies that collected that data, the only conceivable use we had for it was to help diagnose bugs for individual users having issues with the app. Every other question we wanted answered, it was much easier to use aggregated data collated specifically for that purpose. A bunch of videos of people tapping the screen was less than useless for that. And yet when I told people about that, in general, they refused to believe me and believed there must be some super secret nefarious reason we were collecting such "invasive" information.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#7

I’m genuinely concerned about data privacy, but I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve, but I feel like all this could have been avoided by just explaining that this was how the service was able to improve... I’m sure more steps could be taken to anonymise data from th…

I mostly agree, however, there are some issues I'm foreseeing. I've done some NLP work myself and have had access to very private information because of it. The team we were working with were all highly educated and well paid. Because of this, we were aware of the implications of the data we were working with, so at one point, in one of our randomly selected data sets, we found data that was from a public figure and removed it to avoid any possibility of a conflict of interest.

Where my concern is, is that a lot of annotating work is now being done by low wage, low education workers and because of the increasing demand of annotated data sets this group is increasing. Also, because this work is increasingly getting outsourced, there is less direct control of who is doing the work and therefore the chance that a bad apple slips through is bigger. That's what's scaring me going forward.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#8

I actually think they should collect this data. Siri doesn’t understand basic things from me.

Can’t it be opt-in?

> Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#9
post #7

I’m genuinely concerned about data privacy, but I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve, but I feel like all this could have been avoided by just explaining that this was how the service was able to improve... I’m sure more steps could be taken to anonymise data from th…

I mostly agree, however, there are some issues I'm foreseeing. I've done some NLP work myself and have had access to very private information because of it. The team we were working with were all highly educated and well paid. Because of this, we were aware of the implications of the data we were working with, so at one point, in one of our randomly selected data sets, we found data that was from a public figure and…

i’d wager that in most cases “low wage, low education” workers have much better morals than your “highly educated well paid” team.

Re: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

#10

I’m genuinely concerned about data privacy, but I’m kinda surprised about the outcry about all of this. I guess it’s relatively common knowledge for hacker news readers that all of these systems need to have human intervention to improve, but I feel like all this could have been avoided by just explaining that this was how the service was able to improve... I’m sure more steps could be taken to anonymise data from th…

It is not at all a given that machine learning systems need covert review of user data. The training data can come from paid users or explicitly opted in users. Do not normalize this behavior, it is not normal, OK, or required.
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