Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by blub » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #159

lancesells wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main function of a phone is to make phone calls. In order to do that, it activates a microphone during the call.

This is not the same as listening, never mind always listening. A home assistant must always listen in order to recognize the activation words.

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

#162

Post by criddell » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

cheeseomlit wrote: post #148

criddell wrote: post #142

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.

It's not about telling you what's right and wrong, it's about giving you the tools to make those kinds of decisions. It's already part of an engineering curriculum.

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

#163

Post by mikeash » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #160

mikeash wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know that phones don’t turn on their microphones outside of a call?

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

#164

Post by bilbo0s » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

bredren wrote: post #137

Can anyone give insight into how grading is specifically used? Are the results used for ML training?

Well, it isn't anymore apparently.

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

#165

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #101

raxxorrax wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making people expend mental energy on otherwise unimportant/irrelevant decisions is anti-user. Then don't ask them and let them explicitly toggle the option to share information. That isn't anti-user. Your privacy invasions are anti-user.

> Then don't ask them and let them explicitly toggle the option to share information. Is incrementing a counter if an app crashes a privacy invasion?

There's a difference between a post request with zero content to some count API and a request with metadata. If there were a way to send a request without even info like IP address, it'd be even less objectionable, but that kind of request doesn't exist on our current tech stack.

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

#166

Post by dwild » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

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…

> Just because most people don't understand the implications of what they agree to,

That's what needs to be fixed for real and not only for the technological world but for everything. We sign SO MANY contracts without any knowledge of what it contains and even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't understand most of them.

I think that for anything that implicates us (ourself or our information), it should be clearly stated beforehand in a manner that almost everyone can understand.

Android permission is a good example of good and bad practice. It tells you what the app can do, but at the same time it's too generic and

> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS.

In Quebec, if you want to become a software engineer, you need to do the engineering classes which do include an ethics class. That class is meaningless and just there because of the previous corruptions issues in engineering we had.

Not that it can't help, but I just feel it's easy for it to become meaningless too.

I think a class, most probably in high school, that teaches the implication of oversharing could help much more.

Sure there's SIRI that could be harmful, but we often forget how Reddit and Hacker News can be even more harmful, without the product being malignant itself or having any of theses techs implemented. Nowaday people share so much about themselve and each piece of information individually is perfectly fine, but in conjunction can become much more harmful. Doxing is awful, but often, it happens with things that are posted willfully by the victim (I'm not victim shaming, just that I'm pretty sure that person wouldn't have shared all of this, or at least would have done it differently, if they had been aware of the risk).

Maybe it could be interesting to create a platform that list what happens to our information in different platforms, what is shared or not, what is accessible or not, what we have control over or not.

In the past I was amazed when I went to Google My Activity and saw how much times Google thought I was using the voice feature. It doesn't seems to be as bad nowaday, my most recent is nearly a year ago and was a legitimate demand, but when I found that history at first there was some things that were quite bad. One of them was a good portion of a private conversation with someone else. There was nothing dangerous, but it's definitively something to be aware.

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

#167

Post by jerf » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #153

blub wrote: 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.

Cell phones, even now, can't be doing that much background processing unknownst to us, because they are connected to a battery, battery life is a big deal in a highly competitive industry, and we'd all notice if they drained very quickly.

ISTR there are documented instances of law enforcement and/or intelligence doing that sort of thing to phones, and the battery drain causing it to get noticed.

Hooking it up to an outlet is a legit different thing.

If battery tech or power reduction tech progresses sufficiently, including just by continuing on its current curve (most power reduction rather than battery tech), cell phones will rise to the same level of concerning.

(Cell phones of course leak location data full time, and some similar things like that. I'm not saying the current cell situation is awesome either. Only that there is a legit reason to be more concerned about gear hooked up to actual power lines than portable gear.)

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

#168

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

kalms wrote: post #15

throw03172019 wrote: post #3

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

What are basic things to you?

Things that I remember failing off the top of my head:

"Set a timer to remind me every hour for the next five hours."

"Open Harry Potter on the Kindle app" (or more generally "do trivial X on Y app")

"Continue playback" (under many random circumstances)

And all the bizarre requests that it responds to with "you need the apple TV app"

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

#169

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

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.

All the outrage means you might be wrong about the majority. Or I might. Let's not make empirical statements without data.

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

#170

Post by ls612 » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #141

justin66 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS. We need a bit more than that. People do things they've been taught are wrong all the time. They do them somewhat less often when there's a structure in place to hold them accountable.

Doctors and structural engineers have standards bodies and certification processes to ensure their members are behaving ethically and using sound practices. Perhaps we should have similar for software developers.

Doctors and structural/civil engineers kill or maim people when they screw up. Software engineers (at least those working on these sorts of projects) um, leak peoples data when they screw up? It seems entirely appropriate that the standard for the former is different than the standard for the latter.