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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics should be a mandatory part of any STEM program.

Ethics isn't something you can learn in a classroom, a college professor can't teach you the difference between right and wrong or good and evil.

Case studies based on tech industry history can be presented.

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

#152
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". This seems like a distorted representation, to support your argument, of what most the complaints and responses were. The gulf between 24/7 recording and "occasionally unintentional sending" is absolutely massive and you just merge them in…

You need to carefully read what you are quoting. The microphones are in the houses 24/7, connected to power and the internet. That is creepy. There were also several creepy situations involving these devices: * Google home had a hardware flaw which actually made it record 24/7. * all assistants activate by mistake when they think they recognize the activation word. Siriously. * An Amazon Echo recorded a private conve…

For some reason smart speakers give me pause but not a smartphone. A smartphone is kind of the same thing (microphones listening) when plugged in with the addition of a camera and a host of other sensors. I guess because a phone's main function is to not listen to us that makes the speakers much more worrisome to everyone?

Even something like an Apple Watch is the same thing with the addition of reading your vitals.

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

#153
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". This seems like a distorted representation, to support your argument, of what most the complaints and responses were. The gulf between 24/7 recording and "occasionally unintentional sending" is absolutely massive and you just merge them in…

You need to carefully read what you are quoting. The microphones are in the houses 24/7, connected to power and the internet. That is creepy. There were also several creepy situations involving these devices: * Google home had a hardware flaw which actually made it record 24/7. * all assistants activate by mistake when they think they recognize the activation word. Siriously. * An Amazon Echo recorded a private conve…

Microphones connected to power and internet 24/7 have been in people’s houses since the 1990s (or earlier, if you consider the phone network to be equivalent). Yet it only became “creepy” when they started talking back. This tells me it’s an emotional response, not rational.

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

#154
post #80

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…

> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS. This is almost never going to happen because ethics=morals and there's no more middle ground to define what is right or wrong nowadays. You can see that already in every societal issue that divides people. Ethics courses would fall in the same pitfall: what is right or wrong depends on your system of values, and there's not much homogeneity in that realm now.

And yet, tons of universities manage to have ethics classes and even ethics majors.

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

#155

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…

Even if your intentions are completely benign, you’ll lose the data in a security breach and then I’m depending on a bunch of criminals deciding I’m not worth their while.

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

#156

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…

I’d push back that the behavior of disregarding privacy is a tech community thing. It’s there, but as a side effect of social culture enabling it.

We’ve been normalized to let it go by social pressure to trade, travel, and be scanned at airports.

Why would the people in tech feel beholden to respecting a societies privacy when the seat of that societies power trained us to give it up in the name of “freedom” and we went along?

This is all fallout from decades giving to special interests. You talk about how people were worries about always on mic concerns. Well folks been writing about the normalization of our behaviors to serve these corps and government undermining privacy in partnership with them for decades. And it fed right into this behavior by tech corps.

This isn’t a tech industry problem. Corporate meddling in human society is bigger than just mics in phones.

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

#157

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…

It looks like the commenter’s point wasn’t about what people consider “a violation of privacy,” because that’s just arbitrary labeling. Anyone is free to consider anything to be a violation of their privacy. The commenter was making specific points about tangible threats like financial fraud.

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

#158
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only that Siri doesn't happen on the iPhone, and it's easy to prove: try using Siri with aeroplane mode on.

The audio to text translation does happen on the iPhone. Siri is a service, yes a network is required to access the service.

Nope, it does not. Only the trigger phrase (“Hey Siri“) is recognised locally on the device (according to Apple), everything that comes after that is sent as audio recording snippet to Apple servers where the actual speech recognition happens.

There are rumours [0] that Apple might enable local speech-to-text at some point, but as of now, that’s not how it works.

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/15/apple-considering...

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

#159
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to carefully read what you are quoting. The microphones are in the houses 24/7, connected to power and the internet. That is creepy. There were also several creepy situations involving these devices: * Google home had a hardware flaw which actually made it record 24/7. * all assistants activate by mistake when they think they recognize the activation word. Siriously. * An Amazon Echo recorded a private conve…

For some reason smart speakers give me pause but not a smartphone. A smartphone is kind of the same thing (microphones listening) when plugged in with the addition of a camera and a host of other sensors. I guess because a phone's main function is to not listen to us that makes the speakers much more worrisome to everyone? Even something like an Apple Watch is the same thing with the addition of reading your vitals.

I mean, the "main" function of a phone IS to listen to you. For phone calls.

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

#160
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to carefully read what you are quoting. The microphones are in the houses 24/7, connected to power and the internet. That is creepy. There were also several creepy situations involving these devices: * Google home had a hardware flaw which actually made it record 24/7. * all assistants activate by mistake when they think they recognize the activation word. Siriously. * An Amazon Echo recorded a private conve…

Microphones connected to power and internet 24/7 have been in people’s houses since the 1990s (or earlier, if you consider the phone network to be equivalent). Yet it only became “creepy” when they started talking back. This tells me it’s an emotional response, not rational.

Nobody considers the phone network to be equivalent :)

Even current smartphones do not turn on their microphones outside of a call, unless one has made the huge mistake to turn their assistants on, or there's an app recording - and at least on iOS that's controllable by permissions and marked clearly when the app is in the background.

Anyway, smartphones are creepy too.

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