Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

Post by cameronbrown » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #91

londons_explore wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS. Voice recognition isn't really possible without someone listening to train the system. If the option is "don't have a voice assistant at all" or "have a voice assistant that sometimes has a human listening", I suspect the public would mostly choose the latter. When you call a company helpline and get connected to a human rather than a robo-voice, most people are happy…

> If the option is "don't have a voice assistant at all" or "have a voice assistant that sometimes has a human listening" It's false that those are the only choices. You don't have to use the whole pool of users as unwitting guinea pigs of your system. You can use a voice assistant that was previously trained on a well informed and hopefully paid pool of volunteers.

Post by fastball » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 5:13 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #161

fastball wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by taneq » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

atoav wrote: post #53

taneq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And if you zoom out and watch the impact of privacy violations on a state level? Privacy violation is power. And all power that isn‘t elected should be limited by those who are, so we can shape our future. The way things are now companies like facebook or google could easily threaten any elected leader with annihilation simply by using the gathered data and sending the right messages to the right people. They wouldn’…

Post by blub » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 6:43 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #199

blub wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern smartphones have assistants that "listen all the time" in the same way that you're saying that smart speakers do (namely, they look for a wakeword).

Post by blub » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #208

Faark wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, modern smartphones allow you to have assistants that listen all the time. Disabling those is one of the first things I do, and I'd be pretty unhappy if it turns out those are still listening and wasting battery (even aside of privacy issues).

No the parent is right. They are not "listening all the time". They're essentially sleeping while a separate process handles the audio stream looking for the wakeword. When it finds the wakeword, it then "wakes up" the assistant which reprocesses the audio snippet to confirm the wakeword is really there (using more expensive analysis), before then actively listening to the rest of the audio.