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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

#181

Post by tialaramex »

jerf wrote: post #167
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.

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 o…

Counterpoint:

Google's actual smartphone line (Pixel) ships with passive song recognition, default disabled. I enabled it because I was curious and it sips so little power that I left it on, but to function it has to be listening to the audio all the time so that it can say to itself "Hey, that is Sabotage by the Beastie Boys".

It doesn't use the network, or the screen (unless you power the screen on to find out what you're listening to) but it passively remembers every recognisable song it heard, essentially forever. So that means it is _listening_ it just doesn't tell anybody about it.

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

#182

Post by mikeash »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #179
mikeash wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know you’re in control?

I don't. It's a spectrum. I don't know that an old-school land line phone isn't always listening. But it was made by some disinterested party who just makes hardware. It was a simple logical device designed to rely on a simple mechanical switch. It could be listening, but it's understandable by someone like me and there's no incentive for anyone involved. I don't really know if I'm in control, but it's reasonable to…

This seems reasonable, but a cell phone would be close to a voice assistant on this spectrum, or even in the same place.

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

#183

Post by emiliobumachar »

mikeash wrote: post #163
blub wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Back in the 1990s, their hardware design was simple enough that any mass surveillance would inevitably get exposed when the odd hacker took his device apart.

These days, I'm not sure at all. All we have is the law as a deterrent, and that's weak, especially to governments.

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

#184

Post by kjaftaedi »

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…

The outcry is over the leaks from the Dutch contractor that worked for google to the media.

He was acting as a whistleblower because he was alarmed at the amount of data he was asked to review that was just people talking privately in their homes (not intentionally interacting with their smart devices)

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

#185

Post by blub »

mikeash wrote: post #163
blub wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This was answered in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20593642

One cannot know with absolute certainty, only with reasonable certainty.

On the other hand, an assistant is listening all the time by design.

If one needs to know with absolute certainty, then they cannot use a mobile phone, nor probably a reasonably modern regular phone.

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

#186

Post by sah2ed »

anilakar wrote: post #84

Protip: When you use Google's handwriting recognition, all the texts you write are visible to people who have opted in to train the neural networks. I've already received tons of names, phone numbers and even something that resemble passwords.

Hearing about this for the first time.

Mind linking to more info on how people opt in to help train Google’s NN for handwriting recognition?

My searches turned up this TC article (from 3 years ago): https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/29/googles-new-app-crowdsourc...

Thanks

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

#187

Post by depr »

ashelmire wrote: post #174
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…

> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS. You think the CS grads / devs are the ones deciding to do this? We're not really given true autonomy. We're grunts. Someone above us decides to do the spying and we either do it or hit the job market.

If the grunts had some spine and ethics they'd hit the job market.

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

#189

Post by inscionent »

starsinspace wrote: post #158
inscionent wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-c…

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208343

> You can use dictation instead of your keyboard to enter text with many apps and features that use the iOS keyboard.

> On iPhone 6s or later, and iPad, you can use dictation without being connected to the Internet. Earlier models of iPhone and iPad require an Internet connection.

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

#190

Post by FiddlerClamp »

lokedhs wrote: post #45
completelylegit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I listen to the Twit podcast, which is usually very good. One thing they do, however, is to stop themselves from saying the word Alexa, and if someone accidentally does so, they beep it out. Why? Because they don't want to set off any so-called smart speakers. I'd argue that going so low as to change the way we speak just to accommodate these devices is quite terrible, and if you have to watch what you say so that a…

In our house we refer to Alexa as "Alesto" when we're discussing her.
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