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Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

techcrunch.com

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

#11

Post by kmlx »

shalmanese wrote: post #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 othe…

yes, in reality no-one cares about you and that might sting a bit. but it gives people a sense of importance when you tell them they’re spied upon.

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

#12

Post by goto11 »

kmlx wrote: post #9
donkeyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think that?

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

#13

Post by Operyl »

kmlx wrote: post #9
donkeyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd probably guess the "gap" of morals isn't that large between the middle class the GP is talking about compared to the low class.

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

#14

Post by vbezhenar »

Siri is already useless when comparing to Google Assistant. And they want to handicap themselves even more. Apple will lose AI fight to Google in the end. Some people probably will value privacy over convenience, but that's certainly not me or majority.

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

#16

Post by mrtksn »

vbezhenar wrote: post #14

Siri is already useless when comparing to Google Assistant. And they want to handicap themselves even more. Apple will lose AI fight to Google in the end. Some people probably will value privacy over convenience, but that's certainly not me or majority.

Are people really using these assistants for anything more than making the device do something? Because in my experience Siri will set reminders, timers etc. just fine and will find the song you are listening just fine and will call someone just fine.

The other stuff feels like a gimmick to me or more like stuff that some middle-level manager spawned to get a nice bonus.

Using a voice assistant "AI" usually feels like trying to make a really stupid person do something for you. It will accomplish 90% of the thing that I am trying to do for %75 of the times and then it will completely miss the point. Okay, maybe with Google it is like %85 of the time but when it misses the point still misses the point completely.

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

#18

Post by techie128 »

donkeyd wrote: post #7
noodlesUK wrote: post #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 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…

Do low wage, low education workers have poorer morals? They are fighting to make ends meet and could care less about your 1st world problems.

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

#19

Post by probably_wrong »

So far, most of the comments here are a good example of both why this happened and why it will happen again.

When people complained that putting microphones in your home 24/7 was creepy, the response was "that's nonsense, Siri is not sending anything unless you specifically ask for it". When it turned out that it does send things you didn't intend, the response was "well, it's not like anyone is listening anyway". Now that we know someone is listening, the response is "it's no big deal, because they don't care and ultimately is good for you".

Just because most people don't understand the implications of what they agree to, it doesn't mean they don't care. And the levity with which the tech community disregards other people's privacy concerns seems to me one of the reasons why everything everywhere is spying on us nowadays.

We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS.

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

#20

Post by calcifer »

shalmanese wrote: post #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 othe…

> People have really bad intuitions around privacy.

> Having worked at companies that collected that data [...]

No, you just have a different personal definition of privacy. The fact that you think your use of my data is innocuous doesn't mean you are not violating my privacy. If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent.

Somehow, I don't think an honest consent prompt like "Can our app silently record your screen and send it to us?" would get you the results you want.

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