381–390 of 573 posts
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"Violate the user's privacy in order to build a product" is lazy engineering. There are plenty of avenues to collect the data needed at that scale, it's just that none of them are as cheap as simply spying on users.
Lazy engineering gets to market first, and if most users don't find it harmful, the company wins?
I was a huge Google Fan but this is becoming lunacy. I understood trading some data and privacy for great search results, maps and free quality email. But people willingly bringing always on listening devices in to their homes (beyond what smartphones are already capable of) I just can't comprehend it. Why would people voluntarily do this in exchange for being able to ask for weather, play a playlist, add a todo and…
I find their news product a useful barometer of the extent to which they've abandoned that. Last Monday I sat down at my workstation and the top item - amid war, political instability, and everything else going on in the world - were articles about the Google Pixel 4. I know this wasn't a reflection of my browsing habits - I'm just not interested in phone technology at the product level, and and any online shopping/product research that I do these days happens on a separate account on a separate device, because I don't want to mix up my consumer preferences with my intellectual interests.
You would think that with all Google's brainpower the presentation and distribution of news would by now have seen massive advances, but instead it has simply magnified the worst aspect of print and Tv news. I'm beset with sports, entertainment, 'health' (mostly quackery), and 'technology (mostly consumer products) news every day, even though I used to be able to opt out of those things. If I make the mistake of looking at a sports article on my workstation or phone, I am swamped with sports articles for the next day or two, presumably because the sports market is so lucrative and Google's algorithms get tremendously excited at the possibility that I am adopting the consumer the consumer profile of a sports fan.
Likewise I am constantly being advanced second- and third-hand sources of news based on SEO and existing reach; every other story I read is a half-assed rewrite of original research done by a news outlet with a smaller brand footprint. If I'm lucky I can see that in the first paragraph or two and can click through to the original, if not it's because a big news outlet is just stealing or redoing stories without credit or attribution and I may find out about it later when I read Twitter.
I could rant on and on and on about Google's news product and about their other products and practices, but all my critiques of the firm boil down to this: google has become a company that takes bids (including from itself) on the order in which it provides leaves to consumers, while denying them sight of the trees they are plucked from.
Then what about digital assistants, and cellphones, and connected car computers, and...?
The people avoiding voice assistants and smart locks probably have 50 way more vulnerable security gaps in their personal lives
>"Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way," Osterloh said. "It's quite important for all these technologies to think about all users... we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity." How much do they not care about privacy that a chief exec with an army of lawyers and advisors "haven't thought about this before"?
> stakeholders that might be in proximity I didn't realise visiting a friends house made me a stakeholder in all of their technology choices.
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In the short run, it gives the company three direct benefits for making the technology work (besides the "They can advertise at you better" one that people like to drumbeat on). 1) Context is nearly invisible, and is constructed from dozens to hundreds of data points. Holding state on the user (not just from direct interaction with the agent, but from other services the agent can be aware of) makes a lot more context…
All of these are addressable engineering challenges if privacy were a priority. It's just that privacy is not a priority. (1) is not that hard, just subscribe to feeds or query cloud services from the device. (2) is harder but could be done by treating the devices as a cluster or sending data up only when it can't be easily recognized and storing it only long enough to be useful in training (and storing it anonymousl…
I'd like to see regulations addressing this issue directly, in addition to more strict pro-privacy regulation. For instance, I'd love to see it so that data, software and compute become independent - instead of current vertical integration. That is, I want to a) own my data, b) choose where it'll be processed, and c) have the software processing it come to the data - this way the vendor supplying software for c) won't be able to take the data and sell it or hold it for ransom.
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> Why does the device have to record and send everything to the cloud to provide this experience? It's everything after the hotword, not everything.
You're getting downvoted, but this is literally baked into the hardware.
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What does having a Nest thermostat get you? I'm a tech dude, I build modern software, but I live in a dumb, old fashioned house. My programmable Honeywell thermostat, which has no internet connection, does a perfectly fine job of keeping my home the right temperature. My door locks use a key, and keys have great battery life, and my smoke detectors beep instead of speaking to me. What am I missing by not having inter…
I have an Ecobee rather than a Nest, but I had the Nest before I moved and the one thing I note is that it having access to temperatures and weather outside the house means it can choose just to run fans to circulate the air from outside to regulate the temperature inside instead of running the heating or AC. If it knows the outside temperature is the temperature you want inside, it can just shut everything off. A du…
Knowing when you're home can also be done quite well without any Internet access - just see if your mobile device recently associated to the wifi.
These things can trivially be built without the privacy concerns. The business model might be a bit harder if you can't collect the data, though...
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All smartphones, Apple and Android, use dedicated audio processors which are always listening for the command word by saving recent audio to a buffer and analyzing it before discarding it. There has never been any evidence that I've ever seen that these audio processors save and transmit their work pre-activation, only post-activation of the service. Although I do remember in the 2014-2016 time frame when the CIA hac…
>All smartphones, Apple and Android, use dedicated audio processors which are always listening for the command word This is blatantly false. Many high-end android phones and all recent iPhones do this. A large number of phones do not.
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I have an Ecobee rather than a Nest, but I had the Nest before I moved and the one thing I note is that it having access to temperatures and weather outside the house means it can choose just to run fans to circulate the air from outside to regulate the temperature inside instead of running the heating or AC. If it knows the outside temperature is the temperature you want inside, it can just shut everything off. A du…
The system in my house just has an exterior temperature sensor. You don't need an Internet connection to know the temperature outside your house, and the "outside temperature" it's getting from the Internet may be quite different than the temperature of the air outside your house anyway. Knowing when you're home can also be done quite well without any Internet access - just see if your mobile device recently associat…
The thing I really liked about the Nest is that I just turned the dial to where I felt comfortable and it just took care of everything else for me without me needing to do anything. As long as you're brave enough to put screws in a wall and hook up a handful of wires to connectors, it took about 15 minutes of me getting it out of the box to it being installed and configured. I can't say the same about any other programmable thermostat I ever had. Seriously it wasn't an awful lot more complicated than the mercury switch thermostats I've installed.
The handful of Honeywell programmable thermostats I've installed had a disastrously bad user experience. In fact, I installed the Ecobee in my current house because I got so pissed off going through the programming cycle of the Honeywell I gave up before I got to Wednesday :'D