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Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

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Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#421

Post by chenning »

eslaught wrote: post #335
mey wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value privacy, my nest thermostat is the only IoT device in my house that talks to the internet or can be accessed remotely without a VPN. What I find most valuable is it programs itself. Am I cold? Turn it up a bit, hot? Turn it down a bit. Suddenly I have stopped having to adjust it at all. Even as life has changed. It has some nice other features, such as preheating/cooling, telling me how long it will take to g…

Ok, but what on this list actually requires an internet connection? I guess the integration with your power company. But aside from that? You could put a local AI model into the Nest, and it shouldn't need to talk to the internet at all. It can keep the data locally, and be programmed to draw inferences without help from the mothership. For some reason we've decided it's ok to gratuitously connect everything to the i…

Don't you need data aggregation to build the model though? I think that's part of the problem, but I could be wrong.

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#422

Post by ianmcgowan »

saluki wrote: post #115

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 have a few echos and a google home, and I love the feeling of living in the future by controlling things with my voice.

It may be naive, but I think the device vendors have way more to lose if it turns out they are actually recording all the time, not just listening for the wake word.

It will be the wrong road if we end up at 1984, but I’m hoping for the Culture, or at least the Jetsons...

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#423

Post by BlueTemplar »

Forbo wrote: post #412
BlueTemplar wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is the only one of the GAFAMs that it's not practical to boycott : boycotting Amazon Web Services breaks a large part of the Web.

Trying to boycott any service that uses reCAPTCHA is pretty impractical, as well. Lots of stuff also uses the Google hosted AJAX libraries.

Right. I tend to forget about it because for the most part you only get reCAPTCHaed when creating a new account...

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#424

Post by sterlind »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #374
mojuba wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it looks comfortable in the Star Trek universe because it is implied that voice activated stuff is controlled by a super-AI. That is, the AI won't give humans access to the audio. Which in turn means we are going to have a super-AI that can restrict our rights and itself have access to vast amounts of information about us. I.e. Star Trek is a society essentially controlled by the AI, as it will be above us.

It isn't. In fact, people there are uncomfortable about computers giving them orders (TNG S03E06). It works because in Star Trek, the society works. For instance, a ship's captain could easily access plenty of surveillance records about their whereabouts and activities, but as a matter of course, they don't . Cases where someone abuses technology for ulterior reasons are presented as negative, and protagonists do the…

In TNG they ask the computer for someone's location every other episode, usually without hesitation. Didn't go so well for Barclay, when they walked into his cringy holodeck fantasy program.

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#425

Post by 205guy »

chenning wrote: post #211
saluki wrote: post #115

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 don't think this is just a Google issue. Osterloh just happened to be the first one to come right out and say, yeah, maybe you should tell your guests. Personally, I thought the bigger news (insult) was when he said, "Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way." Give me a break. You knew it. I knew it. We all knew it. Maybe the right thing to do is have the device recognize there's an unknown voice…

Exactly! He knew it, the whole company knew it and took advantage of it, and didn't disclose it publicly until questioned by a reporter.

I see parallels to the genetic testing kits: it's all fun and games until police use it to find people who committed crimes. Just wait until investigative units realize FAANGs have recordings from inside houses that they can supeona.

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#426

Post by JohnFen »

michannne wrote: post #85
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #2

>"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"?

They are clearly at fault, but at this point customers need to be more cognizant of the fine print. I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March, which is around the time I started actively hunting for options to turn off anything which reveals private information. Taking steps to learn how to reduce my online footprint also helped

> I recently did a Google takeout of my data and found for most services they have no tracking on me after March

You found that they have no tracking data that they're willing to disclose to you. We don't know if that translates into actually having no tracking data.

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#427

Post by pnw_hazor »

naasking wrote: post #220
saluki wrote: post #115

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…

> 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. Always-on listening doesn't seem like a huge deal. What matters is the policy of allowing Google people to listen to captured audio, even if it's for training purposes. This is skirting uncomfortably close to a dystopian surveillance society. If you want to gather…

Also, while the owner of the device may have consented to recording as part of the TOS, guests certainly have not. Thus, in WA if you don't get affirmative consent from your guests on the actual recording you have committed a crime.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9.73.030

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#428

Post by JCBarry »

tareqak wrote: post #369
JCBarry wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably worth mentioning that the Google Nest Thermostats are one of the only Nest devices without a microphone. Source: https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9330256?hl=en

Thank you for this information 'JCBarry. I was legitimately alarmed and confused. I searched for the word “thermostat” in the article, and I didn’t find it, but I could easily be out of date with respect to Google’s Nest and IoT branding. Thanks again,

Happy to help!

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#429

Post by pnw_hazor »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #333
cmsonger wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal view is that the biggest issue here is the lack of user protection. I'd be a LOT less concerned about this if the appropriate legal framework protected me. The Star Trek vision of voice as an interface is a good vision. The question is how the regulatory framework protects users in this world and keeps it from being the dystopian nightmare that our "for profit corporations get to do whatever they like as…

Star Trek is a post scarcity society. There is no capitalism, commumism or even an economy. Every basic need is met. People join Starfleet and work as officers purely so they can better themselves and explore the stars. This is incredibly optimistic vision of the future. We are far more likely to end up in a cyberpunk nightmare where corporations are richer than entire nations and technology is used to subjugate and…

The Expanse seems to show where we are headed.

Re: Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

#430

Post by solidasparagus »

prepend wrote: post #74
Terretta wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all big tech are at it. The reason you hear a global sigh that “my battery life is terrible!” at every major iOS release, is the photo face to people clustering is done entirely on-device, and which photos are in the cluster is not shared across devices through iCloud. There are several such features where Apple has made life difficult for themselves and the UX a little less seamless for users, in service of not…

Is Apple the only big tech that’s using AI on device in a privacy protecting way? I appreciate their approach to user functionality that doesn’t dump all my data into a near infinite number of collectors. I also think it’s a neat way of distributed computing to use the cpus of all these phones sleeping at night to crunch stuff is actually cheaper than cloud. I think because the phones are sunk cost that is idle a few…

Believe it or not, Google is the leader in the space of privacy-centric AI - see Federated Learning.
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