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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

#21

Post by abhisuri97 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #19

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". No…

Minor point: While I do agree that ethics course should be a part of CS curricula, wouldn’t managers be the ones who likely pushed for the pattern you’re remarking upon? (Ie ethics classes would be more useful for them?)

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

#22

Post by usrusr »

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.

The problem isn't a single-value metric of morals, whatever that may be, the problem is that one group is bored and not invested in the project while the other has far more exciting things to do than wondering who they might be listening to.

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

#23

Post by taneq »

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…

Excellent point. I'm way more creeped out about some shadowy corporate spook digging through my photos, but I'm way more likely to actually be materially disadvantaged by $search_company analysing my search terms, realising I'm really REALLY interested in buying [X], and quietly dropping from their results any mention of [X] vendors who haven't paid at least $y for advertising this quarter (including, most likely, my best deals for [X]).

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

#25

Post by ThePhysicist »

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…

My privacy should not depend on your disinterest to abuse my data. There were many cases where workers abused access to sensitive information like tracking data, and people that illegitmately access data don't always do a ROI calculation to see if it's economical to do so, often they do it e.g. for revenge or personal interests.

Also, I think Apple did not stop this practice because it is in general unethical or illegal to collect and analyze such data (it is not), but because they are marketing themselves as champions of user privacy, and crowdsourcing speech-to-text translation of potentially sensitive user data without properly informing their users just does not correspond to that image. In addition, they might be afraid of facing regulatory action in the EU, which could greatly damage their image as well, so it's a reasonable decision to halt all data processing until they can ensure full compliance.

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

#26

Post by dogecoinbase »

abhisuri97 wrote: post #21
probably_wrong wrote: post #19

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". No…

Minor point: While I do agree that ethics course should be a part of CS curricula, wouldn’t managers be the ones who likely pushed for the pattern you’re remarking upon? (Ie ethics classes would be more useful for them?)

The engineers would know not to do it. And if we had a decent professional organization, we'd know that we'd be supported by our fellows when we refused to perform unethical or unsafe work.

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

#28

Post by completelylegit »

mrtksn wrote: post #16
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 lik…

The day when you can just say “lights on, 50%” and the assistant in the next room understands you don’t mean it is when we will have the right amount of universal compatibility.

Until we can derive decisions based on who is speaking and where they ”are” - I think it’ll always be clunky.

“Hey Alexa tell Hue to set light scene livingroom to 80%” is cool that it exists for those who really need the solution but its not easier or cool for sure but we’re so far from that.

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

#29

Post by donkeyd »

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.

Maybe, I'm just making an observation. My biggest issue is that lack of control over outsourced workers over internal workers.

In my situation it was very clear that breaching the agreements would not just lead to direct end of contract, but also possible legal steps and a permanent record, leading to a much smaller chance for a similar job, for which I've specifically had an education. For uneducated workers, this if often less of an issue, especially for off-shore workers.

I also don't think low wage/education workers have less morals, but as the workforce gets bigger the chance of bad apples also gets bigger. I wrote exactly that in my previous comment.

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

#30

Post by Alissia17 »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #26
abhisuri97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor point: While I do agree that ethics course should be a part of CS curricula, wouldn’t managers be the ones who likely pushed for the pattern you’re remarking upon? (Ie ethics classes would be more useful for them?)

The engineers would know not to do it. And if we had a decent professional organization, we'd know that we'd be supported by our fellows when we refused to perform unethical or unsafe work.

Rate my young hot ass, pls -- https://ezo.no/kitty17
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